Timetastic

Timetastic is a staff leave planner built around a single deliberate constraint: it does one job and refuses to expand into a general HR suite. Used by more than 170,000 people, it handles annual leave, sick days and other absences for small and medium-sized organisations that want the holiday spreadsheet gone without buying a full human resources platform they will never fully use. Employees request time off from the web app or their phone in a few taps; their manager receives a notification and approves or declines in one click; the calendar updates and everyone who needs to know is informed. Leave allowances, carry-over, part-time pro-rata entitlements, public holidays for the relevant country and different leave types are all handled automatically, so the perennial question of how many days someone has left is answered by the system rather than recalculated by hand each time.

The value for managers lies in visibility. A shared wall chart shows who is off and when across the whole organisation or a specific department, making it obvious at a glance when too many people from the same team have booked the same week — the clash is caught at request time rather than discovered a fortnight before. Calendar integration pushes approved absences into Google Calendar, Outlook and other calendars, and Slack and Microsoft Teams notifications surface upcoming absences where teams already talk. Timetastic also tracks sickness absence and can produce Bradford Factor scores, giving smaller employers a straightforward way to spot patterns without a dedicated HR analyst. Reporting covers remaining allowances, absence by department, leave taken over time and year-end positions, all exportable. Setup takes minutes rather than an implementation project, which is much of the appeal for businesses without HR software experience. Pricing is deliberately low at around GBP 1.20 per user per month, with a free version for the smallest teams and a free trial available. It suits any organisation from a handful of staff to several hundred that simply needs leave booked, approved, tracked and visible.