Many entrepreneurs use Excel to keep track of holidays. HoorayHR sees many entrepreneurs switching from a free leave tracker templates in Excel to our smart leave registration app. We want to show you why entrepreneurs use Excel to keep track of holidays and why they always quit using Excel in the end. And we want to tell you there are better alternatives for your leave registration process, that are also affordable but above all save a lot of time and money.

Keeping track of holidays in Excel: the benefits

All entrepreneurs will face a moment in which their team will grow. You can grow from two to five employees in a short time or in a few years. First, you keep track of holidays using your calendar, but once your team grows to 5 employees or more you lose your overview. You want to know what the annual leave allowances are and when the holidays were taken at once. So the first step is keeping track of holidays in Excel. Just download an leave registration Excel spreadsheet. In short, getting started with a leave registration in Excel is easy and fast.

Keeping track of holidays in Excel: the drawbacks

The advantage of Excel is that anyone can create a spreadsheet. Whether it is in Excel, Google Spreadsheets or Dropbox, often these programs are already available. There are disadvantages to keeping track of leave in Excel, which may eventually cause things to go wrong.

• Calculating annual leave allowances accurately is difficult (think of different types of contracts, the difference between types of leave, expiry dates of leave, etc.)
• A shared leave tracker in Excel with all data involved isn’t always in line with privacy regulations.
  Feel free to check out our blog on ‘Making your HR administration GDPR proof’.
• Employees don’t always have direct access to your Excel template. No insights, no up-to-date overview in real time of their annual leave allowance, and they can’t always track their holidays in Excel by themselves.
• Keeping track of holidays in Excel takes a lot of time. Formulas break, you have to enter everything yourself, and having the wrong version in front of you happens more often than not. This is valuable time you could be spending on your business!

An alternative for Excel: a smart leave app

More and more entrepreneurs realise that they want to spend their time on their business and their skills, not on repetitive administrative tasks such as keeping track of holidays in Excel. HoorayHR sees SME’s switch from their Excel file to our leave registration software every day. This way they enjoy the benefits of a smart leave app. Below we have outlined the main reasons why they switch to HoorayHR and stop keeping track of their holidays in Excel.

Save time and money on your leave administration using a leave app

Keeping track of holidays in Excel seems a smart and low-cost solution, but that is not the case. On the contrary, with a smart leave app you save more costs. A small investment of a few euros per employee, which you earn back in no time. HoorayHR’s clients say our leave app has the following effects:

1. Save time by automating your leave administration

Unlike keeping track of holidays in Excel, all leave requests are automatically calculated and processed. Annual leave allowances are accurate to two decimal places and are calculated in real time. Including statutory and non-statutory leave allowances! Employees have insight into their leave budgets and no longer ask unnecessary questions. This saves a lot of time for entrepreneurs.

2. Save money through accurate calculations of the annual leave allowances

Keeping track of holidays, annual leave allowances and expiry dates is a complex procedure. By working with a smart leave app, everything is calculated 100% accurately and you make sure that you do not accidentally release or pay out too much leave.

3. Increased employee satisfaction because of the convenient leave app

Perhaps most importantly, your employees will be super happy if they have an overview of their own leave registration and online personnel file. A handy HR app that allows you to request a holiday straight from the comfort of your own home, and to see when other colleagues are off in the company calendar. And synchronised directly with your own calendar and Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar. That’s easy, isn’t it?

As you can read, keeping track of holidays in Excel is indeed free, but it will cost you a lot of money when your team grows. Want to try the HoorayHR smart leave app and stop tracking holidays in Excel? Take the 14-day free trial.