Holiday requests sent over email or WhatsApp and logged by hand in a spreadsheet

15/09/2026

Someone on the team wants a few days off and asks for them however feels most natural: an email to their manager, a WhatsApp message, sometimes a quick question in passing that has to be remembered later. There’s no single place where time off gets requested, so there’s no single place where all of it can be seen together until someone pulls it together by hand.

That person — HR, admin, or whoever handles this on top of everything else — has to read the request, check the team calendar to make sure it doesn’t overlap with another approved absence or a moment when everyone is needed, reply confirming it or asking for different dates, and log it wherever the record is kept: a shared spreadsheet, a calendar, sometimes both because the team checks one and payroll checks the other.

Where the time goes with time off by email

The first cost is gathering requests that arrive through different channels: what’s in the email isn’t in the WhatsApp thread, and before deciding anything, it has to be clear what’s actually been asked for and what hasn’t. The second is checking for overlap: looking at the whole team’s calendar to make sure two people aren’t asking for the same days if that would leave something uncovered, which means keeping that calendar current and checking it every time, not just when something looks off. The third is negotiating when there is an overlap: someone has to go back to whoever asked, propose a change, and wait for a new answer before the request can be closed. The fourth is keeping two records at once — the spreadsheet and the calendar, say — and remembering to update both when something changes, because updating only one means the other stops being useful for what it was set up for.

None of this happens once a year: it happens every time someone asks for a day off, which in a normal-sized team is close to every week.

The four figures for time off and absences

Here a case is one absence request: from the message arriving to it being answered and logged where it belongs. The frequency usually groups better into two-week periods than into single days, because requests don’t arrive evenly spread out, and the duration hides in checking the team calendar, not just in writing the reply.

Say a small business reviews time off requests every two weeks: 6 requests per round, 15 minutes per request — reading the message, checking the team calendar, replying and logging it — with someone whose hour costs €22. That’s 156 requests a year, 39 hours, and around €858 a year.

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What gets automated first in time off and absences, and what doesn’t

The first thing to automate is capturing and logging: a single form for requesting time off, instead of an email or a WhatsApp message, writes the request straight where it’s needed and skips the step of copying it out by hand. An approval flow with an automatic notice to whoever decides replaces actively hunting for the message, and the calendar updates itself the moment something is approved, without that second step of logging it separately.

What stays in someone’s hands is the decision when there’s a genuine overlap: who gives way, whether the team can cover it with who’s left, or whether different dates need to be requested instead. That depends on knowing the team and on judgment that isn’t written down in any rulebook, and no system replaces it, though it can flag the overlap before anyone has to discover it by hand.

What we won’t tell you about time off and absences

What’s usually missing here is a reliable count of how many requests come in during a normal period, precisely because they arrive scattered across email, WhatsApp and the odd verbal mention that never gets written down until someone remembers to. Without that number, the process’s real frequency is a guess, and the annual cost built on a guess would be a figure that looks measured without being one. Keeping count for a couple of months, even just by logging each request on a separate list, is what turns that impression into a figure you can actually use.

If this is how time off gets requested and logged on your team, describe it in Handmetric: which channels it arrives through and where the record ends up. Describe your process.