Managing time off should be simple, efficient, and stress free. That’s exactly what Day Off, the all in one vacation and leave tracking app, sets out to do. Available on iOS, Android, and the web, Day Off is designed to streamline how teams and individuals manage their paid time off (PTO), vacations, sick days, and other leaves all while staying productive and organized.
Recently, Be Productive, a content creator focused on productivity tools and apps, featured a comprehensive review of the Day Off app. In their video, they highlight the app’s intuitive interface, customizable features, and usefulness for both small businesses and large teams. Let’s dive deeper into what makes Day Off a standout tool for leave management.
What Be Productive Said About Day Off
The popular productivity focused YouTube channel Be Productive gave Day Off an excellent review, calling it one of the most intuitive PTO tracking apps currently available. In the review, they praised the app’s clean UI, easy onboarding process, and powerful features that don’t overwhelm the user.
They specifically pointed out how helpful the shared calendar is for team coordination and how the leave approval workflow removes the hassle of traditional PTO requests. Be Productive’s review serves as a strong testament to Day Off’s value for individuals and teams looking to stay organized without complexity.
What is Day Off?
Day Off is a leave management system built for simplicity and flexibility. It’s ideal for startups, small businesses, remote teams, and even individuals who want to keep track of their vacation days and PTO without dealing with spreadsheets or complicated HR software.
Whether you’re a team manager, HR professional, or employee, the app gives you full control and visibility into leave balances, upcoming absences, and approval workflows all in a user friendly interface.
Top Features of Day Off Vacation Tracking App
Dashboard Calendar
Day Off’s Dashboard Calendar offers diverse views and filters, ensuring a comprehensive display of blockout dates for efficient leave planning and management at a glance.
Calendar view: The calendar shows both official holidays and approved leave requests, helping you track team availability. You can view it monthly for a broad overview or switch to weekly for detailed daily insights. A list view is also available, displaying each day’s accepted requests with employee names, leave types, and whether it’s a half day or full day.
Calendar filters: You can filter the calendar by team or location to view approved leave requests for specific groups or regions, making it easy to see who’s off and when within any segment of your organization.
Requests: When multiple employees request the same day off, a “+X” indicator appears on that date. Clicking it reveals detailed information about each request, including submission and approval dates, leave type, and the employee’s balance for each leave category.
Blockout dates: Blockouts appear on the calendar with a triangle icon (limited blockouts as a third triangle). Clicking on them shows whether they apply company wide, to a team, or a location, along with restrictions and approved requests. Fully blocked days are also marked, clearly indicating their scope and purpose.
Employees management
Day Off app streamlines employee management with easy adding and importing, profile updates, and comprehensive leave request tracking for efficient workforce administration.
Add or import employees: Once your company account is set up, adding your team is quick and easy. You can import employees via Excel or add them individually using their email or phone number. Assign each person to a team, location, and custom leave policy if needed, and designate up to two approvers per employee.
Employee’s profile: Easily manage your team by accessing each employee’s profile to update personal details, adjust leave balances, and assign teams. You can view their leave history (past, present, and future), edit or delete requests, and customize their leave policies, all in just a few clicks for fully personalized time-off management.
Requests history: Keeping track of your team’s leave is simple and efficient. With one click, you can view everyone’s leave balances and see all requests in a calendar format, including details like requester, leave type, dates, and reason. Approving or rejecting requests is easy, and you can generate detailed leave reports by employee or leave type and export them to Excel anytime.
Work Schedules
Employers create and assign custom work schedules to teams or individual employees. Whether your company operates on fixed hours, rotating shifts, or flexible working arrangements, Work Schedules enables accurate leave tracking based on each employee’s actual working time.
Fixed Schedule: The Fixed Schedule is the most basic but essential format. It allows employers to specify which days of the week are official working days and which are not.
Fixed Hours Schedule: The Fixed Hours Schedule takes daily structure to the next level. It allows you to define exact start and end times for the workday, as well as optional split shifts and break deductions.
Flexible Hours Schedule: This schedule supports flexibility in when employees work, while maintaining control over how much they work.
Rotating Shift Schedule: Rotating schedules are often complex but essential for 24/7 operations. This option enables you to set up dynamic, repeating shift patterns that change weekly.
Employees list
Day Off’s Employee List simplifies tracking with filters and allows seamless management via bulk actions for quicker operations.
Employees list: Get a clear overview of your employee list, including their photo, name, work start date, assigned approver, location, team, and leave policy. You can also easily track their leave balances by comparing used versus total days and hours.
Filters: Easily filter your employee list by name, team, location, or leave policy to quickly find specific details or view grouped data. This saves time and helps streamline team management.
Actions: By clicking the three dots next to an employee, you can take several actions, view or edit their profile, access sections like employee info, requests, balance, team, policy, holidays, and work schedule. You can also give the employee admin permissions to approve subordinates’ leave or delete them if necessary.
Bulk actions: Bulk actions let you efficiently manage multiple employees at once. You can quickly add days off or comp offs, change their team, location, policy, work schedule, role, and approvers, or delete or deactivate selected employees, all in just a few clicks.
Approval workflow
Streamline Approval Workflow: assign two approvers per employee. Instant notifications enable quick one click approvals for new leave requests, making the process smooth and hassle free!
Pending requests: Stay organized with an easy-to-use calendar that displays all team leave requests at a glance, including who requested time off, leave type, dates, and reasons. Approving or rejecting requests is simple, and you can quickly generate and export detailed leave reports to Excel.
Approver actions: By clicking “View Details,” approvers can instantly access key information about leave requests, including submission time, planned dates, and approval status. They can track each step of the process, whether it’s awaiting a second approval or fully approved/rejected, with real-time status updates.
Override actions: HR has the ability to override approvers, allowing them to instantly approve or reject any leave request, regardless of whether other approvers have responded. This ensures faster processing and avoids delays using the “force accept” or “force reject” option.
Requests Management
Effortlessly handle employee requests, approve, edit, or delete them, all while accessing detailed reports for complete oversight!
Accept/reject requests: The main admin has a dedicated section for reviewing pending employee leave requests. They can view all details, including the employee’s name, leave dates, duration, type, and any submitted reason. If rejecting a request, the admin can also include a custom rejection reason to keep the employee informed.
Edit/delete requests: Admins can edit previously approved or rejected leave requests by changing the leave type or adjusting the start and end dates. They can also delete old requests, with all updates automatically reflected in the employee’s leave balance.
Leave policy
Create countless tailored policies with varying leave balances and allowances for your team. Assign these policies based on teams, locations, or directly to individuals, making customization a snap.
Leave policy: Day Off makes leave management simple by allowing you to create multiple custom leave policies tailored to your company’s needs. This ensures accurate tracking of each employee’s leave balance and supports a variety of policy rules across different teams.
Policy leave types: After creating a leave policy, you can add unlimited leave types and customize settings such as auto approval, half days, negative balances, and document requirements. You can also manage accruals and carryovers, giving you complete control to design a PTO policy that fits your organization’s unique structure.
Assign policy: Day Off gives you flexibility in assigning leave policies using three methods, by location (to cover all employees in one place), by team (for group-specific needs), or individually (for personalized policies). It’s an easy, adaptable way to tailor time-off rules to your organization.
Accruals
The balance accrual feature accurately gives employees their leave balance over a year period with different ratesm and accumulates leave days providing users with a real time overview of accrued time off for effective planning and utilization.
Accrual types and settings: Day Off’s Accruals feature allows employers to distribute leave balances gradually over time, based on either the fiscal year or the employee’s work anniversary. Employees can earn leave weekly, biweekly, monthly, or semimonthly, providing a flexible and fair system that fits any business structure.
How it shows: To view an employee’s accrual details, go to their profile and open the “Balance” section. There, you’ll see their total and current leave quota, the next accrual date, and the amount to be added. You can also enable customization to adjust these settings for specific employees when needed.
Carryover
Day Off balance carryover ensures unused leave days roll over, allowing users to save accrued time off for future use, promoting flexibility, and maximizing vacation benefits within the app.
Settings: With the carryover feature, you can allow employees to keep their unused leave for the next year. You can choose between unlimited carryover or set a specific limit in days or hours. There’s also an option to add an expiration period, defining how long the carried-over balance remains valid before it expires.
How it shows in employees’ balance: The deferred balance, which displays the amount of leave carried over from the previous year, appears in the employee’s “Balance” section. Admins can manually adjust this amount at any time for any employee if changes are needed.
Blockout Dates
Effortlessly manage time off during crucial periods by blocking dates. Prevent accidental approvals and keep operations smooth and on track!
Block periods: The Blockout feature allows you to set specific time frames, such as during important meetings, projects, or company events, when leave requests are restricted or limited. You can name each blockout, define its duration, and apply it company-wide, by team, or by location. All blockouts are listed in one place for easy editing or deletion.
Limit the number of requests: When creating a blockout, you can choose between two options, completely blocking all leave requests (“no request”) or limiting the number of allowed requests for that period. You can apply these settings company-wide, to certain locations, or to specific teams.
How it works and how it shows to employees: The dashboard displays a triangle icon on blockout dates, indicating any restrictions for the company, a team, or a location. Clicking on the icon reveals blockout rules, submitted requests, and details about fully blocked periods. Employees also see this icon in the date picker when submitting leave, if the date is limited, they can still request time off; if fully blocked, requests cannot be submitted.
Multi Locations
Customize multi locations easily: set unique working days and holidays. Effortlessly tailor schedules for multiple locations in one go!
Multiple locations: Day Off supports unlimited locations, making it simple to manage employees across different countries, offices, or branches. Each location can have its own settings, ensuring accurate leave tracking based on regional or office-specific policies.
Location holidays: You can customize public holidays for each location, allowing you to set national days off individually. This ensures compliance with local regulations and provides a tailored, location-specific approach to holiday management.
Import holidays: After setting up your account, you can easily import official holidays from Google Calendar by selecting your country and year. You can choose only the statutory holidays you need and delete any that don’t apply, giving you full flexibility.
Manually add holidays: If your team observes a special day off that isn’t included in Google Calendar, you can manually add it. Just enter the holiday’s name, start date, and end date, and it will appear in your holiday list automatically.
Teams and Departments
Organize your workforce flexibly: form teams and departments, designate specific approvers, and customize leave policies to suit each team’s requirements!
List of teams: Day Off is perfect for companies with multiple teams, allowing you to add, edit, or delete an unlimited number of teams. You can organize teams by department or group employees under a custom leave policy that fits their specific needs.
Team approver: Choose a team approver who will be responsible for reviewing, accepting, or rejecting leave requests from team members and managing their time-off records.
Team leave policy: You can assign a specific leave policy to each team to ensure that their time-off rules align with their unique work schedules and requirements.
Balance Reset
Balance Reset offers flexibility in managing leave balances by allowing admins to choose a specific month for resetting balances or to reset them based on employees’ anniversaries.
Fixed date: You can set a specific month, such as January, for employee leave balances to automatically reset, marking the start of a new work year and accrual cycle.
Anniversary date: For employees whose leave entitlements are based on their joining date, you can enable the anniversary reset feature. By entering each employee’s start date, their balance and work year will automatically reset on that date, ensuring accurate and personalized PTO tracking.
Both options: You can use both reset methods at the same time, setting some employees’ balances to reset on a fixed date (e.g., January 1st) and others based on their individual joining dates. This flexible setup allows for a customized and efficient leave balance renewal process across your organization.
Report
Balance report: The balance report provides a clear overview of employee leave balances, showing the number of days taken from each leave type, along with the total number of days and hours used.
Detailed report: The detailed report allows admins to easily extract all accepted, pending, and rejected Day Off requests. This feature ensures full transparency and helps manage employee leave efficiently.
Total report: The total report displays the total number of days and hours each employee has taken off within a selected period, making it easy to analyze overall time-off usage.
Accruals report: The accruals report includes key details such as each employee’s leave quota, next accrual date, next accrual amount, earned leave, and used leave.
Carryover report: The carryover report gives a detailed view of employees’ remaining leave, carried-over days, and the expiry dates for using them.
Integrations
Google Calendar: The Google Calendar integration syncs all accepted Day Off requests directly from the platform to your online Google Calendar, keeping schedules updated automatically.
Outlook Calendar: The Outlook Calendar integration syncs approved Day Off requests straight to your Microsoft Calendar, ensuring all absences are visible alongside work meetings and events.
Slack integration: Boost productivity with the Day Off and Slack integration! Employees can easily submit leave requests, check balances, get approvals, and receive daily updates on who’s off, all within Slack for quick and effortless management.
MS Teams: Connect Day Off with Microsoft Teams for smooth and convenient leave management. Employees can request time off, check their balances, and stay informed directly within Teams, making PTO management easier than ever.
Announcements
Day Off’s Announcements allow targeted messages to the whole company, specific teams, or locations for precise and quick communication.
Announcements to employees: The Announcements feature in Day Off makes it simple to share important messages across the company. Just write your message and click “send”, employees will instantly receive it through mobile app notifications and email.
Send to all, team, or location: You can choose how to deliver your announcement, to the entire company, a specific team, or a particular location. This ensures that the right people get the right information quickly and efficiently.
Mobile and Web Access
Day Off is available on:
- iOS
- Android
- Web platform
This cross platform access ensures that employees can manage their time off anytime, anywhere whether they’re at the office or on the go.
Conclusion
If your team is still using spreadsheets or email threads to manage time off, it’s time for an upgrade. Day Off delivers everything you need for smooth, transparent leave tracking without the burden of learning complex HR software.
With its balance of simplicity, customization, and accessibility across platforms, Day Off empowers teams to focus on productivity while ensuring that rest and time off are handled with care. Whether you’re a 5 person startup or a 500 person organization, Day Off scales with your needs.