Making Absence Management Faster

The last thing you need as a business owner is more admin. And that's why companies like ours exist: to reduce the admin burden, to save you money and to free up your time so you can grow your business.

One of those time-consuming admin tasks is the holiday approval process. As a manager, even if you have a system in place, you still have to receive the form, check the spreadsheet for any conflicts (hoping it’s up to date), give the employee the ok, update the spreadsheet (hoping nothing goes wrong) and finally update your calendars to ensure you know when the employee is off. It’s time-consuming and the process is prone to errors.

With our absence management software your employees can book their holidays via an app, you can instantly check any conflicts, approve leave with just a few clicks and your calendars are automatically updated. Now obviously this will save you (and your people) time. But how time exactly? We decided to find out.

We started by mapping out the average manual holiday process. We got people from various parts of the business to give us their experiences of booking holidays with the companies they’d previously worked for.

Although past research demonstrated there is a variety of ways in which employers manage their employee’s absences, we were surprised to see how much variation there was, especially between those who have similar employment backgrounds.

After we’d drawn a few manual processes for holiday requests, we started to see some similarities and felt confident we could create a process that would be familiar to business owners and employers throughout the UK.

First, we set up a system in the office which emulated the manual process. We printed and placed holiday request forms on our office managers desk, and we created spreadsheets on our network’s hard drive. We also set up an Outlook calendar and found finding a filing cabinet in which we could place absence request forms for future reference.

It required a lot of running around the office with stopwatches, collecting forms, filling them in, dropping them off with a manager for them to update spreadsheets and calendars. We then replicated the process using our own BrightHR software. After totting up all the times we found that automating the absence management process was at least 10x faster than using a manual process - and that’s if nothing went wrong in the manual process!

With 77% of businesses resetting their holiday entitlement at the start of the year, and the annual deluge of holiday requests in the first week back after the new year that’s time you could be using to concentrate on more important business matters. 

Is it time to switch to a smarter solution?

Everything associated with processing staff holidays is done more efficiently with BrightHR software.

• No forms, no spreadsheets – deal with online requests and holiday approvals in just one click
• No more puzzling over holiday calculations – automatically calculate time off based on hours/days worked
• No one wondering ‘How much holiday do I have left?’ – online calendar shows employees how much leave they have and highlights conflicts
• No admin - all checks, calculations and notifications for manager and staff are done in real-time

At least 10x faster than manual processes, BrightHR lets you manage holidays and absence in real-time and whilst on the move – from any web browser or via our app. The time saved on processes, is time you can put back into growing your business. 

Let us help you to spend time effectively. Register now for your free 30 day trial of BrightHR.