Introducing the Leave Tracker Excel template – Your Ultimate Solution for Streamlined Leave Management! Are you a HR Manager, a Small Business Owner, or a Project Manager? Regardless of your role, if you’re tasked with managing employee leave, vacations, and time off, this Free Leave Tracker Excel template is your essential tool for efficient and organized leave management.
This Excel template is designed for Microsoft Excel , but if you are looking for a Google Sheet template, please visit Employee Leave Vacation Tracker in Google Sheets .
Here is a sample of Leave Tracker dashboard you can create instantly using this Excel Template.
Do check our Employee Leave Manager in Excel for additional features
The template has 5 visible sheets. (Settings, Employees, Leave, Team Dashboard, Employee Report).
Here is the overview of steps to use the template.
Detailed Steps
Now, let’s see the steps in more detail.
Before we begin, if you are new to Excel tables, please read Introduction to Excel Tables for data entry . Data entry in all our templates use Excel tables and a quick introduction to that will get you going in the correct direction.
The template by default supports 5 types of categorizing your leave. Since different companies may have different names and different number of leave types, the template supports customizing them.
By default, you will see the leave types (Vacation, Sick, Unpaid, Half Day, Other). You can just type over these names and replace with your own preferred names.
How to handle half-day leaves
You can see that there is an option to assign ‘Day Value’ to each leave type. This setting is present to handle partial days of leave. For example, I have entered 0.5 for ‘Half Day’ leave type. That means that when an employee takes Half Day leave, template will add 0.5 to leave taken total and reduces the Worked days by 0.5.
If your company allows 2 hours leave in an 8 hour workday setup, that would be 0.25 day. You can create a leave type and enter 0.25 as ‘Day Value’.
In order to calculate attendance of employees automatically, we need to know company weekends so that we can remove them from working days.
Since our goal is to provide a global solution to vacation tracking, we have the option of selecting any combination of weekend days. In the screenshot above, I have chosen Sunday as Weekend.
So, this tells the template to do 3 things.
Enter list of holidays in your company.
The template will treat the holidays similar to Weekends for calculation purposes, but holidays will be displayed in a different color on the calendar. This allows us to view holidays and weekends distinctly.
Now, we move to the Employees sheet.
We will enter the Employee Name, Start Date (date when the employee began employment) and then Termination Date (if applicable). The Start Date and Termination Date allow the template to calculate the count of working days for each employee correctly.
Since the template can help you manage leave for multiple employees for long term windows (even many years, as there is no limit 🙂 ), it is quite possible that new employees join the company and current employees may leave. I want the template to work smoothly for you even when that happens.
Now, for the last data entry section, we move to the Leave sheet.
We enter leave taken by each employee here. There are four fields (Employee Name, Leave Start Date, Leave End Date and Leave Type) in this table.
If an employee takes a 5 day vacation, you can enter that in one row by providing Leave Start and Leave End dates.
If an employee takes a single day leave, please enter same date in Start Date and End Date fields.
Leave Type field has data validation built-in which shows the 5 options we set in the Settings sheet.
We are done with data entry. It’s time to see the template’ magic in creating the vacation calendar and report.
The dashboard is interactive as it allows the user to choose the month for which we want to view the leave data for. We will enter the month by selecting Year and Month.
There are two pages in this Dashboard sheet. First is the leave calendar view.
As you can see from the above screenshot, the leave types are shown in different color. The legend is shown at the top indicating what each color means. In addition to the 5 leave types, we also have display for the following: Holidays (purple), Weekends (Dark Gray), Not Employed (Dot pattern) and Not Applicable (Diagonal Line pattern).
Order of priority for colors: Not Applicable > Not Employed > Holidays > Weekends > leave types
Holidays and Weekends are self-explanatory. Not Employed will represent the days before the employee began employment and days after the employee termination date (if applicable).
You can use this calendar view to assess if you will have enough coverage in your team for specific weeks (for example, during the holiday season).
Monthly Summary
This sheet also shows the monthly summarized count of days taken off under each leave type, total leave taken and Worked Days.
Total Leave is the sum of leave taken under each of the 5 leave types.
If an employee’s leave overlaps with a holiday or a weekend, it does not count as a leave day.
Worked Days is calculated as (Company Working days – Holidays – Weekends – Not Employed Days – Total Leave days)
Worked days represents the number of days an employee worked or is scheduled to work.
You can look at this view during the last week of a month, to calculate the next month’s capacity (in work days) for the entire team. This will be helpful to evaluate whether you have enough capacity to meet the demand (work) ahead in the next month.
While the previous sheet was about viewing all employees at once in a calendar view one month at a time, we also need to see one employee’s data across months. This is where the Employee Report comes in handy.
Here we have three inputs.
The Year and Employee Name selections should be easily understandable.
The report has the flexibility to allow you to choose the Starting Month from which you need the report to be generated. Once these inputs are chosen, the template automatically calculates the End Date. This is based on whether the employee is no longer with the organization, then the termination date is considered the End Date or the latest date in the Report is considered End Date.
That is, in the above example, the End Date is the last date of the current Employee Report for Clark since he is still with the organization.
This sheet has 2 pages as well. First, the calendar view.
As we discussed with the Team Dashboard, the colors and the legend work the same way. For the chosen employee and year, we can visualize the complete year’s leave patterns.
The second page presents the summarized count of leave and worked days.
EMPLOYEE LEAVE MANAGER
