Leave on a spreadsheet, and when to stop.

A leave spreadsheet works for longer than most vendors admit. One approver, one leave year, one country, one person maintaining it: that setup can be accurate for years. It stops being accurate when three things arrive together, which they usually do in the same quarter: more than one approver, a balance that has to be provably right on a stated date, and unpaid days that change what somebody is paid.

Five signs the sheet has already stopped being right

You rebuild a balance by hand at least once a month, because someone questioned a figure and the sheet could not explain itself.

Two people in the same team were both approved for the same week, and the clash was found by a calendar rather than by the balance.

Somebody left, and calculating their final holiday figure took more than an hour of looking through old messages.

A manager cannot see the balance before deciding, so they either approve blind or forward the request to HR and wait.

Payroll asks for unpaid days each month, and the answer comes from memory rather than from a record with dates on it.

Each of those is a symptom of the same structural gap: a sheet stores the end state and none of the decisions that produced it.

Two things a sheet has nowhere to put

The approval trail comes first. A cell that says Approved does not say who approved it, on what date, or what they knew about the balance at the time. That is the record you need when a decision is questioned a year later, and a sheet has nowhere to put it.

Routing comes second. A manager is the right person to weigh a holiday request against the team's workload. A long or repeated sickness absence usually belongs with HR. In Unframed HR an approval chain resolves each step by rule rather than by name, and a chain can be narrowed to a single leave type, so sick leave and annual leave go to different places without two parallel processes.

The arithmetic, and who can check it

A sheet holds one figure per person: days left. That figure is the output of a calculation somebody did once, in their head or in a hidden column, and it travels without any of its own inputs.

We store three numbers instead, on a row that exists per person, per policy, per leave year. Accrued is seeded from that policy's annual accrual when the row is first created. Used moves when leave is taken. Pending is patched the moment a request is submitted, before anybody has decided it. Because all three are held, the available figure can be recomputed from the record at any point and shown to the person who disagrees with it.

That third number is also why a sheet overstates balances. Tracking approved leave alone reports everyone as having more days than they can spend, until an approver clears the queue and several balances move at once, leaving the manager who approved last with the worst information of anyone.

Part-year joiners, leavers, and the carry-over cut-off

The hand calculation breaks first on people who were not employed for the whole leave year. Someone who starts in September and someone who leaves in April both need entitlement worked out against the part of the year they were actually employed, and the method differs by jurisdiction.

GOV.UK sets out the UK position for irregular-hours and part-year workers: they build up leave according to the hours they have already worked rather than receiving a fixed number of days, and for leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024 entitlement is calculated as 12.07% of actual hours worked in a pay period. That rule is the UK's and it does not travel. Every country sets its own method, and the employment contract can sit above it.

The carry-over cap has the same problem in a quieter form. On a sheet the cap lives in a handbook paragraph and the balance lives in a cell, and the two meet once a year in somebody's memory. We keep the cap on the policy itself, next to the accrual it limits, so the December question has a single answer rather than an interpretation. Acas advises making policies clear and easy to follow, sharing them with the whole organisation and training people on them, which is difficult when the rule and the number live in different documents.

What a shared file cannot express

The first is a transfer between group entities. When someone moves, their opening balance has to carry across, and the new year's accrual has to add to it rather than granting the entitlement a second time. We record where an opening figure came from, naming the record it was carried from and the link that carried it, because an imported balance and an accrued balance look identical on screen and only the provenance tells them apart.

The second is separation of duties. In our model the subject of a leave request can never decide it, including an owner or an HR manager who filed leave for themselves. A shared sheet has no way to hold that rule. Anyone with edit access can change a status, and the file records neither who did it nor that they were the person it concerned.

That is also the audit question in its simplest form. If a balance dropped by two days in July, a sheet cannot say who changed it, when, or which request it was meant to reflect.

What actually has to move

Moving leave off a sheet is a data job before it is a software job. Four things have to arrive intact.

The policy definitions: the leave year, the annual accrual, the carry-over cap and the date carried days expire, recorded per policy and per legal entity. Leave accrual and carryover rules worth writing down covers why all four are needed and what GOV.UK sets out for the UK.

The opening balances, with the provenance recorded alongside them, for the reason set out above.

The year's approved absence, so that the used figure matches what people actually took.

The routing, matching how decisions are taken today rather than how an org chart says they should be. Fix the routing afterwards, as a deliberate change people are told about.

What you get back that a sheet never gave you

A balance the employee can read themselves, which removes a category of question from HR's week entirely.

A refusal that carries a written reason back to the person, so a declined request stops being a silence.

An unpaid day that reaches the pay run as a line with the dates attached, for a named person to accept before the run closes rather than as an adjustment next month.

And a leaver's final balance that can be produced in one read. Leave and absence management for a growing team sets out the full loop this sits inside.

The cost question, answered honestly

The spreadsheet is not free. It costs the hours spent rebuilding balances, the duplicate approvals, and the occasional payment of days that were never owed. Those hours are real and they are already being spent, which makes them the right comparison for any price you are quoted.

Our pricing is one rate per person per month that falls as the roster grows, with no base fee, and it is published on the pricing page rather than quoted on request. If the constraint is capacity rather than tooling, Managed HR Services puts a named HR partner on the operation, with the customer staying the legal employer and approving every sensitive action.

Start by counting the hours the current sheet costs in one ordinary month. Most teams have never measured it, and the figure decides the question faster than a feature list does.