Employee Leave & Absence Planner
Track annual leave, sickness and every other absence in one register: entitlement and balance per person, Bradford Factor, cover clashes and a printable report. Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Version 1.0.0 · Updated Aug 5, 2026
Overview
How to use Employee Leave & Absence Planner
The complete in-tool guidance, reproduced here so you can read it before you download.
What this tool does
CM8-22 keeps one register of every period anybody is away from work — annual leave, sickness, parental leave, study, unpaid time — and turns it into the numbers people actually ask for: how many days has this person taken, how many are left, who is off at the same time as whom, and where the sickness pattern is worth a conversation.
Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind. That matters here more than in most tools: an absence register contains health information about identifiable people, and this one never leaves the computer you are using.
Recording an absence
One row per continuous period away. A week off is one row, not five. If somebody is off Monday and then again on Thursday, that is two rows — and the distinction matters for the Bradford Factor, which counts spells rather than days.
Give every row a person and a team. The team drives the clash report, which is the part most people end up using every week.
How days are counted
Leave the working days taken field blank and the tool estimates from the date range, pro-rated by your working days per week:
Estimated working days = calendar days in the range × (working days per week ÷ 7)
That estimate is rounded to the nearest half day and it is deliberately simple: it does not know your public holidays, shift patterns or the fact that somebody works Tuesday to Thursday. For anything that affects pay or entitlement, type the actual number in. A typed figure always wins over the estimate.
Half days are supported throughout — enter 0.5.
Entitlement and balance
Set a standard annual entitlement in the settings. Where somebody differs — part-time, long service, a contractual extra — enter their figure in the this person's annual entitlement field on any one of their rows and it applies to all of them.
Remaining = entitlement − days taken that come out of the entitlement
Only three types come out of the entitlement: annual leave, carried-over leave, and a public holiday you have chosen to treat as leave. Sickness, parental leave, compassionate leave, study leave, unpaid leave and time off in lieu are all recorded and reported, but none of them reduces the annual balance.
The balances table also shows booked — approved and requested leave still in the future — because "days remaining" means very little to somebody who has already booked their summer.
The leave year and carry-over
Set when your leave year starts. Balances are meaningful only within one leave year, so use the date filters to select the year you mean before reading any balance. Filtering to a single quarter and then reading "days remaining" will always look generous.
Carried-over leave is recorded as its own type so it is visible rather than silently inflating the entitlement. Record it as one row at the start of the year with the days carried in, and it will be deducted as it is used.
How much may be carried over, and whether it may be paid instead of taken, is a matter of law and contract in your country. This tool takes no view.
Statuses, and what counts
- Status — Counts towards balances and charts?
- Requested — No — shown as "booked" only
- Approved — Yes
- Taken — Yes
- Declined — No
- Cancelled — No
Keep declined and cancelled rows rather than deleting them. They are the record of what was asked for and what was decided, and that record is worth having if a decision is ever questioned.
The Bradford Factor
Bradford Factor = spells² × total days
It weights frequent short absences far more heavily than one long one, on the reasoning that repeated unplanned absence is more disruptive to a team than a single planned one. Ten separate one-day absences score 10² × 10 = 1,000. One ten-day absence scores 1² × 10 = 10.
Use it carefully, or not at all. The score is arithmetic, not judgement. It penalises exactly the pattern produced by many disabilities and long-term conditions, by pregnancy, and by being the parent of a small child — and in many countries absence related to those things must be discounted or treated differently. Using a raw score to trigger action can be discriminatory as well as unfair.
Treat the trigger as a prompt to look at the individual circumstances and have a conversation — never as an automatic consequence. Take advice before building it into a formal policy.
Cover and clashes
The overlapping absence table finds every pair of people in the same team whose absences overlap, shows the overlapping dates, and flags where no cover has been recorded. Requested absence is included, so you can see a clash before you approve it rather than after.
It compares within a team only. If your cover works across teams, put the covering person's name in the cover field and use that column rather than the team grouping.
What absence costs
Set an average cost for one absent day and the tool values approved and taken absence. Include cover or overtime, lost output and administration.
It is deliberately a single blended figure. It does not distinguish planned leave — which is budgeted for and costs far less — from unplanned sickness, which is what actually disrupts a week. Read the cost of sickness days rather than the total if you want the number that matters.
Privacy and sick notes
Absence records are personal data, and sickness records are health data, which almost every privacy regime treats as a special category needing extra protection.
- Record that somebody was absent through sickness. Do not record the diagnosis, the symptoms or the contents of a fit note in the notes field unless you have a lawful basis and a genuine need.
- Keep exports where only the people who need them can reach them. Consider initials rather than full names for any copy that circulates.
- Do not keep the records longer than you need them, and know what your own retention rules require.
Because everything stays in this browser, nothing here is transmitted anywhere — but a .json or .csv export is an ordinary file on your computer and needs the same care as any other confidential document.
Printing and sharing
Print Report produces a report from whatever the current filter shows: header, headline figures, the four charts, the balances table, the clash report, the full register and your closing notes.
Filter to one team before printing something for a team manager. The register contains sickness data for everybody, and a manager rarely needs to see it for people who do not report to them.
Saving your work
Records, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.
Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you every filtered record for spreadsheet work. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo, so export first.
Accuracy & disclaimer
This tool records what you enter and calculates from it. It does not know your public holidays, your shift patterns, your contracts, or the statutory minimum where you operate.
Statutory entitlement, accrual during sickness and parental leave, carry-over limits, sick pay, and the lawful use of absence triggers all differ by country and by contract, and several of them interact with discrimination law. This is a record-keeping and calculation aid, not employment advice. Check your own obligations, and take advice before making a decision about a person on the strength of a number.