Vacation Flow Logo
How it works

The leave tool you
barely notice.

For business owners, managers, HR admins, and the people booking time off — Vacation Flow works the same way at three people, thirty, or three hundred, and it’s free for teams of twenty or fewer.

Moments that bring teams here

Leave management doesn’t usually become a problem until something breaks. Here are the moments most teams reach for Vacation Flow.

01

The spreadsheet stopped scaling

Three people on it was fine. Fifteen is a mess. Balances drift, requests get lost in DMs, year-end turns into its own project. Vacation Flow keeps the structure of the spreadsheet without the chaos that comes with it.

02

Approvals are blocking the team

Someone's been waiting two days to know if they can book a flight. The manager is on leave and forgot to delegate. Vacation Flow runs approvals through a chain with delegation built in — nothing waits on one person being available.

03

Year-end becomes a project

Closing balances, calculating carryover, checking that everyone's allowance rolls over correctly. Vacation Flow does all of this on a date you set, automatically.

04

The team went remote, or multi-country

Different working weeks, different public holidays, different leave rules. Vacation Flow handles each location in its own context without anyone manually translating between them.

Three roles, three views

Vacation Flow shows you a different shape depending on who you are. The data is the same; the interface bends to your job.

Employees

Most of the time, employees only need one screen — their own.

Their balance, the team calendar, a request button. Past requests live in the history view; decisions waiting on them surface as notifications. The whole experience is designed around the assumption that people don't want to think about leave admin — they want to ask, get an answer, and move on.

Managers

Managers see what employees see, plus an approval queue.

New requests come in with the team's full schedule and the requester's balance already on screen — no second tab, no DM thread asking who else is off that week. Approve, reject, or comment in one action. Reports on their own team are right there too — useful for spotting burnout patterns or planning around coverage.

Admins & HR

Admins set the rules. Most of this work happens once, at setup.

They build policies (different rules for different groups), assign people to them, manage leave types, and run company-wide reports. After that, the admin's job is mostly checking year-end reports, adding new hires when they join, and adjusting policies once a year if something changes.

The model underneath

Most tools collapse everything into “days off and a calendar.” Vacation Flow keeps the layers separate, so policies can change without rewriting history, and one company can run different rules for different teams without anyone manually translating between them.

01
Leave types

The categories — vacation, sick, personal, plus anything custom your team tracks like remote work or volunteer days.

02
Policies

Bundle the rules — which leave types are available, how much each person gets, who approves what, when balances accrue.

03
People

Assigned to a policy. Their balances and approval chains follow from there.

04
Requests

Draw from the balance the policy provides.

What you see when you log in

Three main screens cover the daily use. Most people never need to leave them.

The home screen

Your remaining time off, anything pending on you, and what’s happening on the team this week.

The team calendar

Month, week, or list view. Colour-coded by leave type, filterable by team or location.

The request form

Pick the dates, pick a leave type, add a note if you want, submit.

What runs automatically

While you’re getting on with your work, Vacation Flow does the math in the background.

  • Balances recalculateThe moment a request is approved or cancelled.
  • Carryover and accrualsApply themselves on the schedule you set.
  • The team calendar updatesAs soon as anything changes — no refresh, no sync delay.
  • Notifications go outTo everyone who needs them; no one who doesn’t.
  • Every change is loggedRequest, decision, edit — all timestamped, audit trail builds itself.

As your team grows

Vacation Flow doesn’t change shape between five employees and fifty. The work that’s manual at five — chasing requests, updating spreadsheets — doesn’t reappear at fifty.

Step 1

On day one

Sensible defaults are already in place. Standard leave types, a default policy, your country’s holiday calendar. Most teams change very little.

Step 2

As you add people

New hires inherit the policy of the team they join. No re-configuration, no missed setups.

Step 3

At year-end

Carryover and accruals run themselves on the date you set. Balances reset, unused days roll over per your rules, the new year starts clean.

Step 4

When you cross 20

Vacation Flow lets you know it’s time to switch to Corporate. Your data, balances, and history all stay in place.

Try it with your team

The free plan covers teams up to 20.

Sign up, import your team, run your first request — the system works the same way whether you’re testing on five people or running it for fifty.