For a team under 10, a shared spreadsheet or calendar can still cope if leave rarely overlaps and one person owns the file. Once requests, approvals and edits involve several people, or balances start slipping, a simple planner pays for itself. The best fit at this size is a focused, low-cost tracker with no minimum seats: Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user / month, so a team of 6 is £6 a month, with UK bank holidays loaded automatically and a 30-day free trial.
When a spreadsheet still works under 10
There is no prize for buying software you do not need. A spreadsheet or shared calendar can genuinely be enough for a very small team when:
- You have around three to six people and everyone sees the same shared file.
- One person owns it and makes the edits, so there is never a version question.
- People rarely book the same week, so clashes are obvious at a glance.
- You only track annual leave, and remaining days are easy to count.
If that is you, start with a free staff holiday spreadsheet template and revisit when the points below start to bite. Our Book Time Off vs a spreadsheet comparison covers the trade-off in full.
The tipping points
Most teams under 10 switch not because of headcount but because of friction. The common triggers:
- More than one person edits the file, and changes start to clash or vanish.
- You have had a double-booked week, or someone went over their allowance unnoticed.
- You are adding UK bank holidays by hand each year.
- A part-timer joined and the pro-rata maths is fiddly to keep right.
- Staff keep asking how many days they have left, and you keep looking it up.
If you are nodding at two or more of those, the spreadsheet is costing you more than a few pounds a month. That is the moment a simple planner earns its place.
What to look for at this size
Keep it simple. A small team needs the essentials and nothing it will not use:
- Self-service requests and one-click approvals.
- An allowance per person with days remaining counted automatically.
- A shared calendar showing who is off.
- Half-day bookings and carry-forward of unused days.
- UK bank holidays loaded automatically for the right nation.
What you do not need yet is departments, maximum-absent rules or heavy reporting, and you definitely do not need a full HR suite. Paying per user for onboarding and performance modules makes no sense for a team of eight, as our annual leave tracker vs HR software guide explains.
Why Book Time Off suits a small team
Book Time Off is built for exactly this: a focused leave tracker, priced so small teams are not penalised.
- No minimum seats. You pay £1 for each active person, so a team of 5 pays £5.
- UK bank holidays automatic. Pulled from the GOV.UK feed for England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland, never deducted from allowance.
- Set up in minutes. Add a default allowance, add your people, invite them, done.
- Room to grow. When you do pass 10 and want departments, max-absent limits, Slack or Teams and reporting, they are already in the same £1 plan.
Add your people, load UK bank holidays automatically and approve a request. 30 days free, no card required, no minimum.
As you grow: 10 to 20 people
The same £1 plan carries you past 10 without changing tools. The job does not change, but the volume and the cost of mistakes do:
- Approvals become real. With more requests, "ask your manager" needs to be a clear, recorded yes or no, not an email someone forgets to action.
- Clashes get expensive. Two or three people off in the same small team can leave you without cover, and spotting that by eye on a spreadsheet is unreliable.
- Part-timers and balances add up. More people means more pro-rata allowances and carry-forward, and more chances for a formula to slip.
The biggest reason teams of this size move off a spreadsheet is to stop double-booked weeks. A maximum-absent limit per department turns that from a manual check into an automatic rule, and it is already in the £1 plan.
Approaching 50: departments and reporting
By the time you are heading for 50 people, the difference is structure. Three things become central, and Book Time Off handles all three at the same flat £1:
- Departments and multiple approvers. Each team gets its own manager, its own per-person approver and its own view, so leave is not one person's job.
- Cover protected per team. A maximum-absent limit set per department keeps each team covered, where one company-wide limit is too blunt.
- Reporting. An admin reports view with month, type and department insight charts plus CSV export answers "who has taken what, by team and by month" for payroll or planning. Single sign-on and bulk edits (set allowance, department or approver across many people at once) keep the admin light.
What it costs
Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user / month with no minimum and no contract. Pricing verified in the live product on 16 June 2026:
| Team size | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 5 people | £5 | £60 |
| 7 people | £7 | £84 |
| 9 people | £9 | £108 |
Best for and not best for
✓ A planner makes sense if
- You are near 10 people, or growing toward it
- More than one person manages leave
- You have part-timers or recurring clashes
- You want staff to self-serve their balance
A spreadsheet may still do if
- You are three or four people with little overlap
- One person owns the file with no version confusion
- You track annual leave only, and balances are simple
- You have no data-control or visibility concerns yet
Frequently asked questions
Not always. A team of three or four with little overlapping leave can manage on a shared spreadsheet or calendar. The case for software grows as you approach 10 people, when several need to request, approve and edit leave, when remaining-days maths starts to slip, and when you want to see clashes before they happen. At that point a simple tracker like Book Time Off, at a flat £1 per user per month, costs very little and removes the admin.
A spreadsheet is free but costs admin time and breaks down with clashes and part-timers. Among paid tools, dedicated trackers are cheapest: Book Time Off is £1 per user per month with no minimum, so a team of 6 is £6 a month, with a 30-day free trial and no card. For a small team that is usually less than the value of the time saved each month.
Move when you hit the tipping points: more than one person edits the file, you have had a double-booked week or a miscounted balance, you are adding UK bank holidays by hand, part-timers need pro-rata allowances, or you want staff to see their own balance without asking. Below those, a spreadsheet can be fine; above them, the time it costs outweighs a few pounds a month.
Keep it simple: self-service requests, one-click approvals, an allowance per person with days remaining counted automatically, a shared calendar showing who is off, half-day bookings, and UK bank holidays loaded for the right nation. You do not need departments or heavy admin at this size, so avoid paying for a full HR suite.
Yes. It has no minimum seats and a flat £1 per user per month price, so a team of 5 or 8 pays only for the people it has. It loads UK bank holidays automatically, handles half-days and carry-forward, and staff can request leave themselves. There is a 30-day free trial with no card, so a small team can try it before paying anything.
Vacation Tracker has a limited free plan, and a spreadsheet is free until miscounted balances and clashes catch up with you. Most dedicated trackers, including Book Time Off, run a free trial rather than a free tier: Book Time Off is 30 days free with no card required, then a flat £1 per user per month, so a team of 6 pays £6 a month.
With 10 to 20 people, several need to request, approve and edit leave at once, so versions clash and changes get lost. There is no real approval step, no alert when two people book the same week, and the remaining-days maths is easy to break. Add part-timers and manual bank holidays and the file becomes a job in itself. Dedicated software removes all of that for a few pounds per person a month.
Use a tool with a capacity limit. In Book Time Off you set a maximum-absent limit per department, so once that many people are off on a date, further requests are flagged or blocked. You can also set blocked or blackout dates for busy periods. That turns clash control from a manual check into an automatic rule, which matters most as a team grows past 10.
Yes. You can create departments, each with a manager and its own maximum-absent limit, and set a specific approver per person. Admins can bulk-select people to change allowance, department or approver in one go. Approvals can happen by email or from a Slack or Teams message, so different managers handle their own team's requests. This matters most as you approach 50 people.
Yes. Book Time Off has an admin reports view that summarises approved leave taken per person, per department and per month, broken down by leave type, over this leave year, last year, this calendar year or a custom range. You can filter by department, see month, type and department insight charts, and export the per-person view to CSV for payroll or records.