Holiday request

In the workplace, staff book time off by submitting a holiday request. The form of this request can vary greatly depending on the business and industry in question. At some businesses, staff are required to fill in a formal, written request form and hand this directly to their manager or supervisor. At others, asking for paid time off (PTO) is simply a matter of speaking to a manager in person.

While these methods have been used for decades, they’re not without their drawbacks.

When requests are made using a holiday request form, for example, managers are required to manually check the employee’s remaining annual leave allowance, ensure that no other employee(s) have booked the same dates off, and then enter the dates of the request into a spreadsheet or similar document.

And in the case that staff simply ask their managers for time off, it’s easy for dates to be misremembered or forgotten about entirely, with staff shocked to see their name on the rota for dates they requested off weeks ago.

Staff scheduling software like RotaCloud makes managing annual leave quick and easy. After employees select the dates they’d like to take off via the RotaCloud mobile app, managers receive a notification in their RotaCloud account, at which point they can either approve or deny the request with the tap of a button. Approved holiday is automatically added to the rota, and the employee’s remaining leave amount adjusted — no data entry required.