Tracking employee time off
- Available to book right now, hours
- 27
- Accrues each pay period, hours
- 5
- Accrued so far, including carry-in, hours
- 91
Nothing in these worksheets is a figure we found somewhere. Every number comes from the inputs you enter and the accrual method stated on the page: hours granted divided by pay periods a year, applied to the periods completed, plus carry-in, less taken and less approved. The defaults are a worked example of a common US policy, not a recommendation and not a benchmark.
Tracking employee time off is the employer's job, not the employee's, and the difference matters for how the record has to be built. The employee wants one number: how many days do I have. The employer needs that number for everyone at once, needs to know who is off next Tuesday before approving a third person for the same day, needs an approval trail that survives a manager leaving, and needs to know at year end what is about to expire and what it was worth. That is why a per person calculator is only half of it. The other half is the team view: what the policy grants across everyone, what share of it actually gets taken, and what the leftover is worth in wages sitting on the books.
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Put every employee on a stated policy
An accrual rate, a carry-in figure and a working day length per person. Part timers and mid year starters are where an untracked policy breaks first, and both are just a different number of hours a pay period rather than a special case.
Record the request, not just the absence
Who asked, for which dates, who approved it and when. The absence is what happened; the request is what can be argued about later. Recording only the first leaves you with a balance nobody can defend when it is questioned.
Read the year end before it arrives
Project each balance forward to the year boundary and compare it with your carryover cap. On the worked example 36 unused hours a head sits under a 40 hour cap, so nothing expires; raise the take rate or the cap and that picture changes.
Tracking employee time off: common questions
How much unused PTO does a small team typically carry?
Whatever your own record says, which is the point of measuring it. The worked example uses a 70% take rate as a placeholder: across 18 people on 15 days that leaves 81 days unused and $18,144 of wage value on the books. Replace 70 with your real figure.
Do we have to pay out unused PTO?
It depends on your state and on your own written policy, and the two interact. Some states treat accrued PTO as earned wages that cannot be forfeited. This is a record keeping tool, not legal advice; check your state and your policy document.
Who should be able to see the balances?
Usually the employee for their own, and their manager for their team. PTOroom Pro is multi user on the flat price, so each manager approves their own people rather than everything routing through one person and one spreadsheet.
Will it do what you need for Tracking employee time off?
Tell us what your PTO policy looks like and what you are trying to stop happening, and we will tell you plainly whether PTOroom does it.