How to Set up a PTO Tracker in Google Sheets (2025 Template)

A Google Sheets PTO tracker is a simple, inexpensive way to track annual leave, sick leave and other absences in your team.

This spreadsheet will help you set your team’s work schedule, and avoid delays or issues with short-staffing whenever you have team members on leave. It will also help you identify trends related to absenteeism or presenteeism, which may need addressing.

Keep reading to learn how to create a simple time off tracking spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel, and to get our free 2025 leave tracker spreadsheet template set up and ready to use.

Step by Step Instructions to Set Up a Vacation Tracker in Google Sheets

Here’s a simple process to help you put together a paid time off tracking spreadsheet.

We’ll walk you through how to do it in Google Sheets, but the same thing should work in Excel or just about any other spreadsheet tool.

1. Set up a sheet for each month

First, set up a calendar view for your leave tracker.

The best way to do this is one month at a time, with each month in its own sheet.

Make a column for each day of the month, indicating weekends, team-wide public holidays and any other non-working days in different colors.

2. Add employees’ names

Fill out your employee names in the left-most column, giving each team member their own separate row.

3. Set up a key for different leave types

Now create a key to show each leave type. You could use letters, symbols, colors or a combination of each.

Here’s an example, using colors:

With leaves entered into your PTO tracker it will look something like this:

4. Optional – add total leave allowances and set up leave tracking calculation

If you want your spreadsheet to keep track of the total number of leave days taken each month, add a new column at the end, and add up the totals for each team member at the end of the month.

You can also add a separate tab to track each employee’s yearly allocation for each leave type.

If your business has an unlimited PTO policy, don’t need to calculate the total number of days/days remaining for each team member. But you’ll still want to track how many days each employee takes off, to identify employees who take an excessively high or low number of days off.

5. Manually enter data as you approve leaves

As leave requests get approved, fill the necessary data on your leave tracker.

Duplicate the tab we made for the first month, and adjust the days/weekends to fit the next month. Don’t forget to also add in public holidays.

If you use Excel, the template will still work for you. To get the excel file, click File – Download, and choose Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).

This will give you the leave tracker excel template which you can open and customize for your own use.

Pros and Cons of Google Sheets/Excel Spreadsheets for Time Off Tracking

Many small businesses use a paid time off tracking spreadsheet because it’s convenient, free, and uses software you’re already familiar with. But is a Google/Excel spreadsheet the best option for tracking time off in your business?

Here are some pros and cons of using an Excel or Google Sheets PTO tracker.

✅ Pro: no subscriptions

The best part of using Google Sheets is that it’s free readily available. You don’t need to sign up for an expensive subscription or get to know a new tool. This is a big plus for new startups or growing businesses trying to keep expenses to a minimum.

✅ Pro: cross-platform

Google Sheets is cloud-based and viewable across all kinds of platforms. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on Mac or Windows, desktop, mobile or tablet, whether you’re in the office, out at lunch, or on your backup computer, you can still access your company’s PTO tracker to check or update it when you need to.

✅ Pro: customizable

It’s very easy to customize and make changes to your spreadsheet when needed.

Changing to a 4-day work week? Easy.

Hiring new staff, or existing staff are leaving? No problem.

Changes made to your leave policy? Done.

You don’t need to worry about inflexible software that won’t let you make changes.

It’s also easy to use permissions to share the spreadsheet with the right people and restrict it so only certain people (e.g. managers or HR) can make changes to the sheet.

❌ Con: a lot of data entry

A spreadsheet requires a lot of data entry. For every approved leave request, you may need to fill out several fields to keep your spreadsheet up to date. It might not seem like much when there are just a few people in the company, but as you grow, this becomes a big drain on your productivity.

❌ Con: error-prone

As much as we try not to, human error is unavoidable. It’s a matter of time until you forget to enter a leave into the spreadsheet. Then the day of the leave arrives, you’re looking for the person, and they’re not there.

Queue confusion, emotional outbursts from both sides, mistrust, and potential disruptions to workflow and deadlines.

❌ Con: long time to set up

A spreadsheet PTO tracker like this can work quite effectively, but it does take a lot of work to set up. Even just a simple version, with individual tabs for each month, takes some time to manually fill out with all your employees’ names, plus dates and days of the week.

Setting up a way to keep track of total and remaining leave days for each leave type is another task on top of that. As a result, most founders or managers simply never get around to dedicating the time needed to build the perfect PTO tracker spreadsheet.

❌ Con: automations & reports are clunky

You can set up scripts in Google Sheets and Excel to automate certain parts of your time off tracking workflow, such as automatically updating an employee’s records each time they take a day off. But it takes some know-how to set up these scripts, and even then they are a bit clunky.

It can also be awkward to pull reports on an employee, to see their absence patterns or leave records, unless your spreadsheet is very meticulously set up to manage this.

A Better Alternative – Leave Management Software

Flamingo’s automated PTO tracker is a better alternative for teams who have outgrown manual leave management systems like spreadsheets.

While tracking PTO with a spreadsheet is flexible (and free), it takes a lot of time and headspace to maintain once your team starts growing past a few people.

Flamingo automates this, keeping your PTO calendar up to date without any effort or data entry.

Flamingo also handles the leave request and approval process, creating a seamless process for asking for time off – and for managers or team leaders to review and approve or deny requests.

It keeps a record of each leave request, and lets you pull up a report on any employee’s leave records at any time.

Best of all, it’s not another huge cost to add to your business, or a huge pain to learn and get set up. Flamingo is free to try, and only rises in price as your business grows with it. That means as long as your team is small, the cost stay small as well.

It takes just a few minutes to set up. You can set it up while you make your morning coffee.

Flamingo integrates with Slack, so you don’t have to make wholesale changes to your existing workflow. And if you’re not using Slack, you can still use Flamingo’s standalone web app.

Benefits of Using a Software Tool

Here are a few big benefits of using an app like Flamingo instead of using a spreadsheet to track your team’s PTO.

Automating the busywork

Filling in your spreadsheet every time someone applies for time off, doesn’t seem like a big job. But it adds up, and all that time is time that could be better spent on tasks that grow your bottom line. A software tool automates all this work, saving you time and cutting out the little errors that grow into large disruptions.

The system is already set up for you

When you add a leave management software to your organization, you’re getting a system that’s already set up and ready to go. No need to put aside a day to set up your spreadsheet and teach people how to use it. It’s plug-and-play, which means you can get your leave management system up and working much faster.

Smoother leave request & approval process

A tool like Flamingo also has a system to manage leave requests and approvals. If you use a spreadsheet, you’re still relying on email threads, private messages, face-to-face chats or even paper forms for leave requests.

This provides a huge amount of friction, high potential for error, and difficulty keeping or accessing records.

The right leave management software encompasses this step as well, making it simple to request time off to to review a time off request, and automatically transfers this data into your leave calendar.

Calendar integration

With a software tool you can often export your leave calendar to an external calendar app like Google Calendar.

Many people literally run their lives through a calendar app, making this a huge plus. Having this info sent to Google Calendar (or any other calendar app) helps keep your workflow all in one place.

Notifications

A PTO tracker software can send notifications to a person or a team when there are leaves coming up, allowing everyone to stay up-to-date with the team schedule. This is another hugely complex thing to try and set up if you’re running on Google Sheets alone – and just about impossible to do reliably.

One-click reporting

Your PTO software will also let you pull any information you need relating to your leave management system, at any given time, with just a single click, instead of trawling through your spreadsheet to piece together the data you need. This lets you identify trends and check up on the wellness of your team, quick and easily.

Summing Up

When you’re first starting your business and need a PTO tracker, Google Sheets is a decent option. It allows you to create a custom spreadsheet to fit your needs, and doesn’t require an expensive subscription or learning any complex features.

But as you grow, you’ll need a faster, more reliable solution, like a software tool. You should begin to migrate your PTO tracker to a software tool before you get big enough to really need it, as this will avoid any growing pains when it comes time to move your team to a new system.

A software tool like Flamingo is perfect, whether you’re a large organization or a small team just starting out. It offers pricing that only grows as your team does, meaning it stays affordable, simple and easy to manage when your business is still in its early stages.

If you do want to try out a spreadsheet for your annual leave planner, you can use our employee holiday tracker template to get up and running fast.

But count up the time and errors saved by using Flamingo, and it’s a no-brainer to go with this option over Google Sheets or Excel.