For a settled team of three or four people who rarely book overlapping time off, a shared holiday spreadsheet is fine and free. Past that, the spreadsheet starts costing you in chased approvals, broken formulas, double-booked weeks and scattered personal data. Book Time Off replaces it with self-service requests, one-click approvals, automatic days-remaining, UK bank holidays from the GOV.UK feed and a shared team calendar, for a flat £1 per user / month. It is not an HR suite, a payroll tool or a rota planner, and we do not pretend otherwise.
When a spreadsheet is enough
Plenty of small teams run holidays on a spreadsheet for years without trouble, and there is no need to change something that works. A spreadsheet is usually enough when:
- You have roughly three or four people, and everyone can see the same shared file.
- One person owns the file and makes all the edits, so there is no confusion over versions.
- People rarely book the same week, so clashes are easy to spot by eye.
- You are not tracking much beyond annual leave, and remaining days are easy to count.
- You have no particular concern about who can open the file or what personal data it holds.
If that describes you, a free staff holiday spreadsheet template may be all you need for now. The honest case for switching only begins when the list below starts to bite.
Where spreadsheets break
The trouble with a holiday spreadsheet is that it breaks slowly, so the cost is easy to miss. The usual failure points:
- No real approvals. A request becomes a verbal ask or an email, and the record only updates if someone remembers to edit the file. There is no clear yes or no attached to the booking.
- Version sprawl. Someone keeps a local copy, emails it on, and now there are two truths. The file ends up named something like Holidays_v4_final.xlsx and nobody is sure which is current.
- Hidden formula errors. One dragged cell or deleted row quietly miscounts remaining days, and you do not find out until someone is over or under their allowance.
- Bank holidays by hand. Every year someone has to add the UK bank holidays again, and they are easy to get wrong across England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
- No notifications. Nobody is told when leave is booked or cancelled, so cover gaps and clashes surface late.
- Poor visibility. Seeing who is off next month means reading rows and columns rather than glancing at a calendar.
- Scattered personal data. A holiday file passed around by email can hold personal information that is hard to control or remove later.
In Book Time Off the request, the approval and the updated balance are one action. No file to edit, no formula to fix, no version to chase. 30 days free, no card required.
Side-by-side comparison
A straight look at the everyday holiday job, spreadsheet against Book Time Off. Book Time Off is the highlighted column.
| Job to be done | Staff holiday spreadsheet | Book Time Off £1 / user / mo |
|---|---|---|
| Software cost | Free licence, plus admin time | £1 / user / month |
| Self-service leave requests | No · manual edits | Yes |
| Approval workflow | Verbal or email | Yes · one-click approve / decline |
| Days used and remaining | Manual formulas | Yes · automatic |
| Clash and capacity control | Spot it by eye | Yes · max-absent limits per department |
| UK bank holidays | Add by hand each year | Yes · GOV.UK feed, never deducted |
| Carry-forward of unused leave | Manual | Yes · company limit, optional expiry |
| Half-day bookings | Manual | Yes · AM / PM |
| Shared team calendar and wallchart | Rows and columns | Yes |
| Notifications (email, Slack, Teams) | No | Yes |
| Calendar sync (Outlook, iCal) | No | Yes |
| Reports and CSV export | Build your own | Yes · reports, charts and CSV |
| Access control | Whoever has the file | Yes · admin / approver / staff roles |
| Version control | Easily overwritten | Yes · one source of truth |
| Scales as the team grows | Gets harder | Yes |
Cost comparison
A spreadsheet has no licence cost. Its real cost is the administrator time spent maintaining the file, fixing miscounts and chasing approvals, which is invisible on any invoice. Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user per month with no minimum and no contract:
| Team size | Spreadsheet | Book Time Off / month | Book Time Off / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 people | Free, plus admin time | £5 | £60 |
| 10 people | Free, plus admin time | £10 | £120 |
| 20 people | Free, plus admin time | £20 | £240 |
| 50 people | Free, plus admin time | £50 | £600 |
The honest read: at three or four people the spreadsheet usually wins on cost, because the admin time is small. Once a team is into double figures, an hour or two a month of someone's time spent fixing and chasing the file is worth far more than £10 or £20, and that is before a single miscounted balance or double-booked week.
GDPR, permissions and version control
This is the part that rarely makes the decision but should weigh on it. A staff holiday file usually contains personal data, and sometimes special category data if leave reasons are noted. In a spreadsheet that data is hard to govern:
- Access is all or nothing. Anyone with the file, or a forwarded copy of it, can see everyone's leave. There is no way to show a manager only their team.
- Copies are hard to delete. If someone asks for their data to be removed, or a person leaves, tracking down every copy of the file is difficult.
- No control over changes. Any holder can edit, overwrite or delete entries, and there is no single agreed version.
Book Time Off keeps leave in one place with role-based access: admins, approvers and staff each see what they should, not a shared file. Sensitive leave types can be masked to a generic "Off" in shared calendars and digests, and you can export or delete your data from one place. It is leave management software, not a full information-security programme, but it removes the everyday data risks of a passed-around holiday file.
We build Book Time Off, so we have a stake in this. That is why the spreadsheet case above is specific rather than dismissive: for a very small, stable team a spreadsheet really can be enough. The switch earns its keep once approvals, clashes, accurate balances and data control start taking real time.
How switching works
Moving off a spreadsheet is quick, because you are not migrating a system, just the current picture. There is no generic spreadsheet importer, so setup is a short manual job:
- Set your company default allowance once in Settings, for example 28 days.
- Add your people. You can bulk-add and bulk-edit to set allowance, department and approver across several at once.
- Apply any per-person allowance overrides where someone differs from the default.
- Either enter each person's current remaining days, or simply start the new leave year fresh.
- Invite the team. From then on, people request their own leave and the record keeps itself.
If you are coming from Timetastic specifically, the one-click XLSX import brings your departments, people and this year's approved leave across in a single upload. For the wider field, see the best leave management software comparison.
Best for and not best for
✓ Best for
- UK teams that have outgrown a shared holiday spreadsheet
- Roughly 5 to 100 people
- Teams that need self-service requests, approvals and accurate balances
- Anyone who wants UK bank holidays, a shared calendar and who's-off visibility without a full HR suite
Not best for
- Settled teams of three or four with almost no overlap and no data concern, where a spreadsheet may still do
- Businesses needing payroll, rota scheduling or time tracking
- Teams needing a separate counted-down balance for every leave type
- Anyone needing a public API or enterprise HRIS workflows
Frequently asked questions
For a small, settled team of around three or four people who rarely book overlapping time off, a shared holiday spreadsheet can be enough, and it is free. It starts to struggle once several people request, approve and edit leave, once you need to count remaining days reliably, or once you have to show who is off at a glance. At that point the time spent maintaining the file and fixing mistakes usually outweighs the cost of dedicated software.
The common ones are version sprawl (several copies of the file with no single source of truth), hidden formula errors that quietly miscount remaining days, no real approval step, bank holidays added by hand each year, no notifications when someone books or cancels, and poor visibility of clashes. There is also a data protection angle: a holiday file emailed around can contain personal information that is hard to control, restrict or delete on request.
A spreadsheet has no licence cost, but it does cost administrator time. Book Time Off is a flat £1 per user per month with no minimum, so a team of 10 is £10 a month and a team of 20 is £20 a month. There is a 30-day free trial with no card required, and billing follows your active team size, so adding or archiving people adjusts the bill automatically.
There is no generic spreadsheet importer. Setup is quick though: set your company default allowance, add your people (you can bulk-add and bulk-edit), set any per-person allowance overrides, and you are live. You can enter current balances or simply start from each person's remaining days. The one-click XLSX import is specific to the Timetastic full-organisation export, not to general spreadsheets.
Yes. Book Time Off pulls UK bank holidays directly from the official GOV.UK feed for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and refreshes them each year. They are shown on the calendar and are never deducted from anyone's allowance, so you do not have to add them to a spreadsheet by hand every year.
It is easier to control. Book Time Off keeps leave in one place with role-based access (admins, approvers and staff see different things), rather than in a file that can be copied, emailed and edited by anyone who has it. Sensitive leave types can be masked to a generic Off in shared views and digests, and you can export or delete your data. It is leave management software, not a full information-security programme, but it removes the everyday risks of a shared holiday file.
Sources
Book Time Off pricing and features are verified in the live product. UK bank holiday handling uses the official GOV.UK feed.
| Reference | Checked | Source |
|---|---|---|
| UK bank holidays (England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) | 16 June 2026 | gov.uk/bank-holidays |
| Book Time Off (flat £1 pricing; self-service requests, approvals, allowances, carry-forward, half-days, bank holidays, reports with CSV, role-based access) | 16 June 2026 | Book Time Off live product |