Time off request software replaces a form and an inbox with a path: the employee requests against their own balance, somebody approves, and the balance moves because of it. Every product in the category claims that path. The differences show up in the parts nobody demos, which are cancellation, correction and the year end. This page is a short test plan you can run against any product, including the free ones, before committing a team to it. The free calculator on this site covers the accrual arithmetic in the meantime.
Test the happy path, then immediately cancel
Submit a request, approve it, and check that available fell and taken did not. Then cancel it and check that available went back exactly, that the audit shows the cancellation rather than deleting the request, and that the approver was told. Cancellation is where a time off request system most often leaks, because it is the path least used in a demo and the one most used in a real December. A product that handles cancellation cleanly usually handles everything else.
Test a correction by an administrator
Balances need correcting: a day recorded twice, a carryover typed wrong, a policy applied from the wrong date. Ask how an administrator fixes a balance and, more importantly, whether the correction leaves a trace with who made it and why. If the answer is that they overwrite a number, the record cannot be defended in a dispute, which is one of the two reasons to have left a spreadsheet.
Test the calendar the team will actually look at
A time off request calendar is only useful if it shows the right scope to the right people: the whole company for a team of fifteen, the department for one of eighty. Check whether it shows pending as well as approved, since a manager approving a request needs to see what is already pending in the same week. Check too whether it exports or subscribes to the calendar the team already lives in, because a calendar people have to visit separately is one they will not visit.
Read the free tier's cap, not its feature list
A time off request app free of charge is nearly always capped on headcount rather than features, so the feature comparison is a distraction. Find the cap, find what happens when you cross it, and find whether the request history exports or only the current balances. The request history is the part with the audit value, and a product that exports balances alone is a product you cannot fully leave.
Questions people ask about time off request software
What should I test before buying time off request software?
The cancellation path, an administrator correction and whether it is traced, the calendar's scope and whether it shows pending requests, and the export. Those four separate the products far better than a feature list does.
Is a free time off request app enough?
For a small headcount, often yes. Read the headcount cap and the export terms rather than the feature comparison, because the cap is what you will hit and the export is what lets you leave.
Should requests show on a shared calendar automatically?
Approved ones, yes, to whoever needs to plan around them. Pending ones should be visible at least to the approver, since approving without seeing what else is pending that week is how clashes get approved.
Does a request system replace the written policy?
No. The system executes the policy; it cannot decide it. Accrual, carryover and what happens at year end still have to be written down, and a product that cannot express them will be worked around by hand.