In a five-person team, time off is usually agreed on the fly: a WhatsApp message, a nod in a meeting, a note nobody can find afterwards. It works — until it doesn’t. Somewhere around the tenth team member, someone asks for the first time: “Wait, how many days do I actually have left?” — and nobody knows the answer for sure.

The good news: you don’t need an HR department to track leave properly. You need half a day of work and a few clear rules.

1. Write down the balances — once, but honestly

The first step is the most tedious and the most important: for every team member, write down how many days of leave they have this year, how many they’ve already used and how many remain, including any carried-over days from last year. If you disagree about a number, settle it now — any record is only as good as the data it starts with.

2. Agree the rules and put them in writing

Unwritten rules are the most common source of misunderstandings. Agree and write down at least the following:

  • How far in advance leave is requested (e.g. a week for short absences, a month for longer ones)?
  • Who approves — the team lead, the director, or both?
  • How many people from the same team can be away at the same time?
  • What about leftovers — until when can last year’s days be carried over?

One page of text is enough for a team of up to twenty people. What matters is that everyone knows where that page lives.

3. One channel for requests

The biggest chaos comes not from the numbers but from the channels: one request arrives by email, another verbally over coffee, a third in a message on Friday evening. Agree on one place where leave is requested and approved — and stick to it. Anything agreed elsewhere doesn’t count until it goes through that channel.

4. A calendar everyone can see

Absences stop being a problem the moment they’re visible. A shared calendar showing who is away and when — including public holidays — solves ninety percent of planning: deadlines, on-call duty, handovers. The manager no longer has to remember who’s where; a glance is enough.

5. Check balances quarterly, not in December

The classic situation: it’s November and half the team still has ten unused days. A short balance check every three months — who has used how much, and who is behind on planning — spreads leave across the whole year and saves everyone’s nerves, especially in the fourth quarter.

A spreadsheet is a fine start — until the team grows

You can run everything described above in a spreadsheet, and at first that’s perfectly fine. A spreadsheet, however, doesn’t update itself: someone has to enter every request by hand, calculate the balances and make sure the formulas don’t break. As the team grows, so does the number of small mistakes.

That’s exactly why we built CHRIS — a simple tool where employees submit their own requests, managers approve them with full visibility of remaining days, and a shared calendar with Croatian public holidays keeps itself up to date. It’s free for up to 10 active members, so a small team can bring in order at no cost — and stay organised as it grows.