If your replacement tool has a direct Timetastic import, the switch takes about 30 minutes end to end. Book Time Off, for example, accepts the Timetastic export file directly: download from Timetastic, drop the file into Book Time Off, and your users, allowances and balances are populated in one upload. The 30-day free trial needs no card, so the no-risk way to find out if your data comes across cleanly is to just try it: export, drop, see for yourself.
Why UK SMEs switch from Timetastic
Timetastic is a perfectly good product. The UK SME market is full of teams happily using it, and any honest article about migrating off it should start there. We are not going to pretend it is broken, because it is not. People switch for one of a handful of practical reasons, and being clear about which one applies to you helps you pick the right replacement.
From the conversations we have with teams arriving from Timetastic, the reasons cluster into three groups:
Cost as the team grows
Timetastic's basic plan is £1.20 per user per month, and Pro is £2 per user per month. For a 30-person team on Pro that is £60 per month, or £720 a year. If you only really need the simple wallchart and approvals, the Pro features (burnout alerts, Slack integration, single sign-on, capped leave types) may be paying for things you do not use. Switching to a flat £1-per-user tool saves a 30-person team around £360 a year, every year.
Wanting fewer features, not more
This sounds counter-intuitive but it is the most common reason we hear. Some teams find the Pro plan slightly overkill for what they actually do (request leave, get it approved, see the wallchart) and they want a tool with a smaller surface area. Less to learn, less to configure, fewer settings to misuse.
Tooling stack tidy-up
Some teams arrive having bought a wider HR suite (BambooHR, BreatheHR, CharlieHR) and decided the leave-tracking module either is not as good as a dedicated tool or pushes them up a pricing tier they did not want. Others just want a single, focused tool whose only job is leave so they can stop expecting their HR system to also be a wallchart.
Timetastic offers a 50% discount for charities, Certified B Corporations, Fair Tax Mark holders, 1% for the Planet members and NHS Trusts. If you qualify, the basic plan drops to 60p per user per month, which is genuinely hard to beat. Worth checking before you commit to a switch.
If you have not settled on where to move yet, our Timetastic alternatives comparison lines up Book Time Off, Leave Dates, Vacation Tracker, Breathe and CharlieHR with each price checked against the provider's own site.
What data you can take with you
This is the part most people worry about and shouldn't. Timetastic gives admins a full data export from Settings > Reporting and Backup. You have two formats:
- Excel download. A multi-tab spreadsheet covering allowances, bookings, departments, time-in-lieu balances and an audit trail of all account changes.
- Zip backup. The same Excel file, plus any attachments uploaded against bookings (sick notes, medical certificates) sorted into per-employee folders.
You can run this export at any time, as often as you like. Per Timetastic's own data security documentation, the platform has built-in backup and reporting tools that allow you to export your data as a full Excel export, which fits the UK GDPR standard for machine-readable data portability.
What is in the Excel file
- Users: name, email, employment dates, department, working pattern, current allowance, brought-forward balance.
- Leave: every booking (approved, declined, cancelled), with start and end dates, leave type, half-day flag.
- Allowances: per person, per year: opening allowance, brought forward, used, carry forward, remaining.
- Audit trail: every admin action (user added, allowance edited, department changed) with timestamps. Useful for proving who changed what.
- Time in lieu: balances if you used the TOIL feature.
Whether you switch or not, having a fresh backup of your Timetastic data is good housekeeping. Store it in your usual document system alongside other HR records. Under UK GDPR, you should already be able to produce machine-readable employee data on request anyway.
What you do not need to migrate
One of the surprises for first-time switchers: you do not need to import historical bookings into the new tool. Most replacement systems start fresh on day one and let the past stay in your Excel backup. If you ever need to look up who was off in April 2024, you open the backup file. No replacement tool we know of imports historical bookings, and you will not miss them in practice.
What you do need to bring across is the live data: who is on the team, what their current allowance is, what their year-to-date balance looks like, and any leave they already have on the books for the rest of the year.
When to make the switch: timing and year-end
The textbook answer is "do it at year-end" because allowances reset and balances zero out. The honest answer is that mid-year switches work fine and most teams pick a quiet month rather than waiting for an arbitrary calendar boundary.
| Timing | What to do | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| End of leave year (often Jan 1 or April 1) | Set fresh full allowances in the new tool from day one. No partial balances to carry over. | Cleanest option. Teams with a strict policy year that everyone aligns to. |
| Quiet month mid-year (Feb, Sep, early Nov) | Take a snapshot in Timetastic of each person's days remaining. Set that as their allowance in the new tool for the rest of the year. | Most teams. Avoids the "wait nine months" problem. |
| Peak holiday period (school holidays, Christmas) | Avoid if possible. Too many bookings in flight, harder to reconcile. | Only if you have to. |
If you go mid-year, the trick is the snapshot. Pick your cut-over date. Run the Timetastic export on that exact date. Cancel or finalise any bookings between that date and today (so nothing falls through the cracks). Then for each person, the number you put in the new tool is their remaining balance, not their full annual allowance.
For example, if Sarah has a 28-day annual allowance and has used 8 days by your cut-over date, you set her allowance in the new tool to 20 days for the rest of the year. Next year, on the leave-year reset, you put it back to 28. This keeps the maths honest without any mid-year complexity.
The 5-step migration walkthrough
Below is the full walkthrough. Times assume a 5 to 50-person team. The whole thing fits in a single 30 to 60-minute block (closer to 30 with a Timetastic-direct importer, closer to 60 with manual reformatting), with another hour for testing and announcing.
Export your data from Timetastic. Sign up for the Book Time Off 30-day free trial (no card required). Drop the Timetastic export file into the import screen. After that upload your users, allowances and balances are populated, and you can see exactly what your team will look like in the new tool. If anything looks wrong you have lost nothing. If it looks right, the rest of the steps below take you to go-live.
Export your Timetastic data
Log into Timetastic as an admin. Go to Settings > Reporting and Backup. Click the download link for the most recent year (or "All data" if you want everything). Choose the zip option if you have attachments, otherwise Excel is fine.
Save the file somewhere safe and named clearly: timetastic-backup-YYYY-MM-DD.zip. This is your safety net, your historical record, and your data-portability proof. Do not delete it.
Open the new tool and import users
Sign up for your replacement tool (a 30-day free trial, no card, gets you a working environment to test in). The speed of this step depends entirely on whether your new tool accepts the Timetastic export format directly.
Book Time Off accepts the Timetastic full-organisation export as-is. Drop the export file from your Timetastic backup straight into the import screen and your users, allowances and current balances populate in one upload. No reformatting, no field-mapping, no manual data entry. If you are not yet convinced it will work for your team, this is genuinely the fastest test: the trial is free with no card required, so you can export from Timetastic, drop the file in, and see your team appear in one upload. If it does not look right, you have lost nothing.
If your replacement tool does not accept the Timetastic format directly, you will need to copy the Users tab into whatever CSV layout it expects. That typically takes 10 to 15 minutes for a 25-person team and is mostly busywork: rename a few column headers, save as CSV, upload.
Set allowances and the leave year
If you used a direct Timetastic export drop (Book Time Off does this), each person's annual allowance and current balance are already populated from your export. You can review them and tweak any that need adjustment, but in most cases there is nothing to do.
If you imported manually, set each person's allowance now: full annual amount for a year-end switch (typically 28 days for full-time including bank holidays, or 20 plus 8 if you separate them out), or their remaining balance for a mid-year switch as calculated from your snapshot.
Either way, also set: the leave-year start date (1 April or 1 January are most common), the bank holiday region (England & Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland), and any departmental capacity limits if your tool supports them.
Re-enter any future bookings
This is the bit people forget. If your team has leave already booked in Timetastic for dates after your cut-over, those bookings are not imported automatically. Pull up the Leave tab of your Timetastic export, filter to bookings dated after the cut-over, and add them in the new tool as approved leave.
Most teams have between 5 and 30 future bookings already in flight. Bulk-add them yourself, or have each team member re-book theirs in the first week as part of testing.
Run a parallel week, then go live
Pick a go-live date one week from now. In the meantime, invite two or three trusted people (yourself, an HR contact, a manager) to test the new tool. Submit a fake booking, approve it, decline one, check the wallchart shows it correctly. Make sure email notifications arrive.
On go-live day: send the team email (template below), turn off Timetastic notifications (or keep the account read-only for a month as a safety blanket), and you are switched. Most teams find day one quieter than expected because there is just nothing to break.
Worked example: a 12-person agency mid-year switch
To make it concrete, here is what a typical mid-year switch looks like end to end, using the Book Time Off direct Timetastic export drop:
Admin runs the Timetastic export
Settings > Reporting and Backup, full zip download. 5 minutes.
Sign-up + drop the Timetastic file straight into Book Time Off
After the upload: 12 users, allowances and current balances all populated. Departments come across too: Studio, Account Management, Operations.
Quick review of imported data
Eyeball the allowances and balances. One person's allowance needs a small adjustment, takes a moment. Everything else is correct.
Future bookings re-entered
17 bookings already on the books for the next 6 months. Admin enters them as approved leave.
Bank holidays + departmental limits configured
England & Wales region selected. Studio capped at max 2 absent at once. Account Management at max 1.
Parallel testing week
Owner and HR lead submit, approve, decline test bookings. One small bug found and fixed (someone's start date was a typo).
Go live
Email out to the team. Timetastic kept active read-only for one month. New tool is the source of truth from this point.
Total active admin time: around 30 to 35 minutes. Calendar time from decision to go-live: one week. The agency in this example went on to save £108 a year on the licence, which is real money for a small studio.
Common pitfalls (and how to avoid them)
None of these are catastrophic, but they do trip teams up. Worth knowing in advance.
Forgetting future bookings
Future leave dated after the cut-over does not migrate automatically. Always add it manually from the Timetastic Leave export.
Wrong bank holiday region
UK has three different bank holiday calendars (England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland). Pick the wrong one and St Andrew's Day or 12 July will show up incorrectly. Confirm with each region of your team.
Mid-year allowance maths
People accidentally enter the full annual allowance instead of the remaining balance, gifting everyone an extra week. Always snapshot, always set "remaining" not "annual".
Timetastic-only fields
Birthdays, work anniversaries, custom leave types, TOIL balances. Some are not commonly imported. List the ones you actually use first, then check the new tool supports them before you commit.
Single approver assumption
Timetastic uses one approver per department. Some replacement tools default the same way, others let you have multiple. If you have backup approvers, check this is configurable in the new tool before importing.
Cancelling Timetastic too quickly
You have already paid for the month. Keep the account open as a read-only reference for at least 30 days. Then cancel. There is no minimum term, you can cancel whenever you want.
The single biggest issue we see is people trying to do everything in one rushed afternoon. The 5-step process is fast, but the parallel testing week is not optional. Spread the actual work across two days plus a week of low-stakes testing and the chance of mistakes drops significantly.
Timetastic vs Book Time Off feature-by-feature
If you are weighing up Book Time Off as the replacement, here is the honest side-by-side. We have not skewed it: Timetastic does plenty of things we do not, and saying so straight is the only way you make the right call for your team.
| Feature | Timetastic basic (£1.20/user) | Timetastic Pro (£2/user) | Book Time Off (£1/user) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calendar & wallchart views | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| UK bank holidays auto-loaded | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom leave types | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Half-day bookings | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Email approvals | Yes | Yes | One-click email approval |
| Departmental capacity limits | No | Yes (capped leave) | Yes (max absent per dept) |
| Carry-forward of unused leave | Yes | Yes | Yes (with optional expiry) |
| Blocked / blackout dates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Group bookings & cancellation | Yes | Yes | Yes (whole-company shutdown in one action) |
| Slack / Teams integration | No | Yes | Teams notifications & digest · Slack via calendar feed |
| Single sign-on (SSO) | No | Yes | Yes (Microsoft 365) |
| Burnout / absence trend insights | No | Yes | No |
| Mobile app (iOS & Android) | Yes | Yes | Mobile-friendly web |
| Birthday / anniversary tracking | Yes | Yes | Birthdays & optional birthday leave |
| Accrued leave (day-by-day) | No | Yes | No (fixed annual allowances) |
| Import of users (Timetastic export) | Yes | Yes | Yes (direct Timetastic export drop) |
| 30-day free trial, no card | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Per-month cost, 25 users | £30 | £50 | £25 |
| Per-year cost, 25 users | £360 | £600 | £300 |
The honest take: if you need a native mobile app, Slack, accrued day-by-day leave tracking, per-leave-type caps, or absence-trend analytics, Timetastic Pro still does things Book Time Off does not. But Book Time Off now matches Timetastic on the day-to-day essentials · carry-forward, blocked dates, group bookings, Microsoft 365 single sign-on and Teams notifications included · at £1, which is £240 a year cheaper than Pro for a 25-person team and roughly £60 a year cheaper than Timetastic basic.
For more on the wider market, our review of Timetastic alternatives in 2026 covers the full set of UK options including Leave Dates and the HR-suite tools, and our 2026 UK pricing guide shows where everyone sits on the price ladder.
Announcing the switch to your team
Once your new tool is set up and tested, the team email is the last step. Keep it short. Most people genuinely do not care about the back-end change as long as their leave keeps working. Here is a template that lands well:
Hi everyone, from [date] we are switching our leave-tracking tool from Timetastic to [new tool]. Your remaining leave balance has been moved across so you do not need to do anything. You will get a welcome email tomorrow with a link to set up your account. Takes a couple of minutes. Future bookings already on Timetastic have been added for you. Anything booked from [go-live date] onwards goes through the new tool. Thanks!
Three things this email gets right: it tells people what is changing, reassures them their balance is not affected, and gives them an action item that is genuinely small. Avoid long explanations of why you switched. The team only cares about how to book leave from now on.
What about people who only used the Timetastic mobile app?
Roughly a third of Timetastic users mostly use the mobile app. If your replacement tool does not have a native iOS/Android app, mention this up front in the email and reassure them the mobile web version works fine. In our experience this is rarely a deal-breaker, but it is worth pre-empting.
Sources
This guide is grounded in primary sources. The legal angle on data portability comes from the ICO. The Timetastic-specific details come from Timetastic's own help centre and pricing page.
| Source | Used for | Link |
|---|---|---|
| ICO: Right to data portability | Confirms employees and businesses can expect data in machine-readable formats; sets the legal expectation around export. | ico.org.uk |
| ICO: Employment information | Guidance on retention periods and what employers must do with HR records. | ico.org.uk |
| Timetastic: Reports and backup | Confirms the export workflow (Settings > Reporting and Backup) and the contents of the Excel and zip downloads. | help.timetastic.co.uk |
| Timetastic: Data security and pricing | Confirms data export availability, no minimum term, current per-user pricing (£1.20 basic, £2 Pro), and the 50% charity discount. | timetastic.co.uk/pricing |
| GOV.UK: Holiday entitlement | Background on UK statutory holiday entitlement (5.6 weeks) for setting allowances correctly in a new tool. | gov.uk |
| ACAS: Booking and managing leave | Best-practice guidance on leave policies and approval processes. | acas.org.uk |
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to switch from Timetastic to another leave tracker?
If your replacement tool has a direct Timetastic import, the switch takes about 30 minutes end to end. Book Time Off, for example, accepts the Timetastic export file directly: download from Timetastic, drop the file in, and your users, allowances and balances are populated in one upload.
Most of the remaining time is for testing and announcing the change to your team. With other tools that don't accept the Timetastic format directly, allow 30 to 60 minutes for some manual reformatting.
What data can I take out of Timetastic?
Timetastic lets admins export a full Excel or zip backup from Settings, Reporting and Backup. The Excel file contains worksheets for users, allowances, leave bookings and audit history, with carry-forward and time-in-lieu balances included. Attachments (sick notes, medical certificates) come down in a separate folder if you choose the zip download.
You own this data: under UK GDPR Article 20, machine-readable export is a standard expectation.
Is it better to switch leave tools at year-end or mid-year?
Year-end is cleaner because allowances reset and you do not have to carry partial balances. But mid-year is perfectly workable: take a snapshot of each person's days used and days remaining on the cut-over date, then enter the remaining balance in the new tool as their allowance for the rest of the year.
Most teams switch in the quiet months (January, February, September) rather than waiting for an arbitrary year boundary.
Will I lose my historical leave records when I switch?
No. Your Timetastic export is a permanent file you keep on your own systems. If you ever need to look up who was off in 2024, you open that backup. Most replacement tools do not import full historical bookings, but you do not need them to: the Excel backup is your record.
Keep it stored securely in line with your data retention policy (the ICO advises HR records are kept for as long as there is a lawful purpose, typically six years after employment ends).
Why do UK SMEs switch away from Timetastic?
The most common reasons we hear are price (Timetastic Pro is £2 per user per month, double the cheapest dedicated alternatives), feature creep (the basic plan is solid but Pro features like burnout alerts or Slack integration are not always needed), and wanting fewer bells and whistles for a simpler team.
Timetastic remains a good product. Switching is usually about fit, not failure: if the simpler, cheaper option does what you need, the saving compounds.
Can my team keep using Timetastic during the switch?
Yes, and we recommend it. Run the new tool in parallel for a week before cutting over. Set up the new tool, invite a couple of trusted team members to test it, then announce the cut-over date and switch on the same day.
Keep the Timetastic account active for a few weeks afterwards as a read-only reference, then cancel. There is no minimum term on Timetastic so you can cancel any time.