How to Track Team Leaves (PTO) in Notion (Includes Template)
I'd like to thank Kyriacos for allowing me to share this template. I developed this Leaves Tracker for his family business, and he generously suggested I make it available as a template for others.
To use this template with all its features, you'll need a Business or Enterprise plan in Notion, as the essential page-level access feature is only available on these higher-tier plans.
As you scale your company and teams, there is administrative novelty creeping in. One aspect of such novelty is human resources management. Managing people and, among the many other things, their time-off work. Without a clear system to track and visualize when someone is out of office, such unclarity is one of the possibly many sources of chaos, misalignment and lack of efficiency, which (in)directly negatively impact the value and profitability of your business (besides your leadership effectiveness).
This system aims to close that gap. It is a centralized, simple team leave tracker in Notion, ideal for small-medium teams. As a manager, you can easily track people’s leaves, while each team member can submit and track their own leaves only, without access to anyone else’s data.
Because it is built in Notion, you can customize the system for your specific situation, if you are into that. Or use the system as it is, with all the features I included in an attempt to make it as valid and comprehensive yet intuitive as possible.
You get dashboards where you can clearly see leave requests, track their status, and chat with the team. This replaces all the scattered back and forth you may otherwise have via instant communication tools such as email or Slack.
All the leave history is stored in a structured manner, so you can get insights on patterns over time and never lose data again. Plus, Notion AI can extract insights, build additional features, and chat with you specifically using your team data and preferences.
System Structure Overview
There are four data sources at the foundation of the leave tracker Notion system:
Leave tracker: This is the data source where you track all the leave requests and their status. Thanks to a page-level access rule, each team member can only access their leave requests via their personal dashboard, and no one else’s.
If you wish to change such behavior in favor of transparency, you can remove the page-level access rule and open up access to everyone in your company. The template includes detailed instructions on how to do this.
Public holidays and weekends are not counted in the leave calculations. Hourly leaves are supported. By default, the system defines a workday as Monday to Friday, 9AM to 5PM your timezone. If you wish to change that, there are detailed instructions on the template.
Public holidays: This is the data source where you define all the days you wish to exclude from the leave tracker calculations. For example, if you include December 25th as a public holiday, and John Smith is on leave between December 22nd and December 29th (8 days total), the system will count 7 days of leave (assuming no weekends in between those dates—if there are weekends, those are discounted too).
Teams: All your teams (e.g, Marketing, Sales, etc.), composed of one or multiple People. This data source is for organizational purposes, so you can easily visualize your team directory and track leaves across teams.
People: All your team members, each one related to one or multiple teams. This is your people directory. Each page is a personal dashboard where the team member can visualize and submit their leave requests. If you expand your Notion workspace to other use cases, this dashboard could also contain the team member’s tasks, projects, meetings, etc.
If you wish to build your own custom workspace, submit your interest here.
