How Spreadsheets Slow Down Annual Leave Processes

Many employee-centric regulations prescribe leave quotas for staff in order to allow them to take time off work for either vacation, sickness, or maternity/paternity leave. There are other types of paid leaves such as transit, relocations, or errand leaves, and others which are organization-specific.

Each type of leave has a policy either formulated by the government or by the specific company indicating the eligibility, approval matrix, as well as annual quota within which your workers can avail. Some leaves are preset from the government for a calendar year which help ease of business operations burden and monitoring purposes.

Several organizations maintain individual staff attendance on Excel sheets as they assume it as more cost-effective and easier to manage. However, as the organization evolves, it becomes daunting for HR professionals to regularly update all the data on every sheet. The administrative burden associated with sick leaves recording, annual leave approval, tracking down leave balances becomes uncontrollable. Handling it manually is also extremely time-consuming for a dedicated employee, which can be channelized in other crucial projects. Hence, it becomes imperative for a company to have automated leave management software in place.

Eliminate Spreadsheets and Switch to Automation

1. Evolving Data

Regardless of time and the hard work and time spent by the HR department by manually entering data, becoming too daunting to keep up with the ever-changing staff attendance statuses. HR data is constantly changing with new employees, exiting employees, changing bank information and personal details, training, and much more. Monitoring and upgrading such changes become impossible as the company constantly evolves in number. Hence, with a robust attendance management solution, all information is integrated into the system, and processes are automatically streamlined.

2. Lack of Transparency

Staff communication is a major challenge where HR is concerned. They need to constantly respond to all queries on leave balances and policies on a daily basis. Trying to locate the correct data with Excel spreadsheets is tedious, time consuming, and inefficient. With manual leave software solutions, HR personnel are able to upgrade management of leaves for all employees and employers. Also, allowing each employee their own access to a system with their personal time off data allows HR staff to no longer be bothered by these questions.

3. No Centralized Source of Information

With traditional leave management methods, HR teams usually maintain separate Excel sheets for holidays, appraisals, attendance, and more. In these scenarios, individual teams also maintain their own records to make sure they don’t rely entirely on the HR department for these records. It generates further confusion because of a lack of centralized data to refer back to. Meaning minimal transparency throughout the organization as the data accessible is restricted to the HR and respective teams.

4. Limited Access to Data

As data is not centrally stored, simple details become lost such as leave balances and the status of each team member. These requests needing to be routed via the HR team slows the process down. It not only delays an easy and simple task but also adds to staff member frustrations.

5. Difficultly Determining Leave Year-End Calculations

Many businesses have leave carry-forward methods where staff is able to keep and push into the upcoming calendar year. The balance is in addition to the new quota workers get at the start of each year. HR professionals need to manually calculate the unused leaves for each staff and include it in the next year’s quota. Computing these by hand is extremely tedious and prone to errors, which leads to staff dissatisfaction.

6. No Real-time Information

While storing data manually in various Excel sheets, any requirement from senior management for a particular report can generate panic within the HR department. Employees rushing around to locate the latest version of the data from a heap of files and folders. An online leave management solution provides attendance applications which easily capture real-time data. The data is centrally stored and can be accessed by only authorized personnel at anytime, from anywhere. It also helps management with strategic decision-making based on data collected.

So, what’s the best solution for this? A cloud-based leave management solution is the answer. Such solutions can be quickly accessed from any place to check their available leave balances under every type of leave. Staff can apply for their leaves online while a predefined workflow routes the request to the appropriate respective for approval or rejection through an automatic email notification. By following this, employers can review the worker’s leave balances with a click of a button and take any necessary action.

Hence, minimizing the dependency on HR leaders as managers and workers have their own granular insight and control over the procedure of requesting time off. At the end of each year, management can approve the carry forward of unused leave balances onto the next year while HR staff can upgrade new leave quotas with little to no effort.