A time off tracker is a table with one row per employee and enough columns to answer one question without a conversation: how much has this person got left. Getting there is less about the tool than about the layout, because the trackers that fail do so in the same three ways every time, and all three are decisions about columns rather than about software. This page sets out a layout that survives a full year including the reset, explains what each column is doing, and points at the free time off tracking template on this site, which is that layout with the arithmetic already in it.
The layout
Nine columns. Employee. Start date, because a mid year joiner accrues from it. Annual entitlement in days or hours, in whichever unit you actually run. Accrual rate per pay period, derived from the entitlement. Carryover brought in. Accrued to date as of a stated date. Taken. Booked but not taken. Remaining, which is carryover plus accrued minus taken minus booked. That is a tracker you can hand to somebody else. Anything richer, per request notes, approval trails, belongs in a record rather than a sheet.
Mistake one: no as-of date
Accrued to date is meaningless without the date it was calculated for, and a sheet without that date will disagree with itself between one Monday and the next. Put the as-of date in a single cell at the top and derive every accrued figure from it, so that recalculating the whole sheet is changing one number. This is the difference between a tracker somebody trusts and one that gets checked by hand each time, which is the same as not having one.
Mistake two: taken and booked in one column
If a booked day is written into taken before it happens, the balance is right and the history is wrong, and a cancellation has to be unpicked by memory. If it is not written anywhere, the employee books days they do not have. Keep two columns and show available as remaining minus booked. For a paid time off tracker this is not optional: the whole point of the record is that somebody can answer an availability question from the sheet.
Mistake three: the year end
The reset is where trackers quietly lose data. Unused days either expire, carry over in full, or carry over up to a cap, and whichever it is has to happen in a way that leaves last year's figures readable. The safe pattern in a spreadsheet is to copy the year to a new tab, then start the new year with a carryover column populated from the old one, never to overwrite in place. A free time off tracker built this way lasts as long as you keep making tabs; the reason to move to a record is that the record does this without anyone remembering to.
Questions people ask about time off tracker
How do I calculate an accrual rate?
Divide the annual entitlement by the number of pay periods in your year: 26 for biweekly, 24 for semimonthly, 12 for monthly, 52 for weekly. The free calculator on this site does this and then applies it to a date to give an accrued balance.
Should the tracker be in days or hours?
Whichever your policy is written in. Mixing them is the problem: a tracker in days with a policy in hours forces a conversion at every entry, and the conversions drift. If your team is part time or hourly, hours are usually the honest unit.
Can one tracker cover part time employees?
Yes, if the entitlement is pro rated and the tracker stores hours rather than days. The rate follows from the pro rated entitlement in exactly the same way; nothing else in the layout changes.
Is there a free time off tracker on this site?
Yes. The time off tracking template is the layout above with the arithmetic in it, and it is free to use. It works from your figures on the page and stores nothing between visits.