Composite case study. Based on interviews with four UK creative agencies in April 2026. Names and specific company details have been merged or anonymised. All workflows, pain points, and outcomes described are drawn from real customer conversations.
At a glance
| Company type | Creative agency, hybrid working |
| Team size | ~40 people |
| Location | UK — London studio + remote staff |
| Using Vacation Flow | 3 months |
| Switched from | Shared Google Sheet + manager email |
What changed in 3 months
- ~5 hours/week reclaimed by the People Operations Lead.
- Visible distribution of PTO across the team — including who hadn't taken leave in 9+ months.
- Hybrid days now appear alongside leave, so the projected office count matches reality.
- Three freelancers in non-UK timezones now appear correctly on the studio calendar.
Before Vacation Flow
A 40-person London creative agency had grown out of its spreadsheet without noticing. PTO ran on a shared Google Sheet that the People Operations Lead updated when she remembered. Hybrid days — three in-office, two remote, in theory — lived in nobody's system at all. Approvals happened over email, sometimes lost in a director's inbox for a week. Freelancers in non-UK timezones appeared on the studio calendar at the wrong hours.
Two specific moments pushed the change. First: a senior designer requested two weeks off six months in advance, the email got buried, and the booking didn't make it onto the project schedule. The team flagged a resourcing crisis the week before his flight.
Second: at a year-end review, the People Operations Lead realised that one team member hadn’t taken a single day’s leave in eleven months. Nobody had noticed until she ran a manual count off the spreadsheet.
I'd built a culture where the wrong people were taking the right amount of leave, and the right people weren't taking any. The spreadsheet was actively hiding it from me.
Finding Vacation Flow
The People Operations Lead searched for 'PTO tracker UK hybrid working' and shortlisted three: BambooHR, Timetastic, and Vacation Flow. She ruled out BambooHR (too HR-suite-heavy for a 40-person team) and narrowed to Vacation Flow vs Timetastic.
Why Vacation Flow won
- Hybrid-day tracking alongside leave, in the same calendar.
- Free for teams under 20 — let her trial with the directors before rolling out to the whole studio.
- The "days since last leave" signal was the specific feature she went looking for after the year-end realisation.
- UK public-holiday calendar with regional variations (Scottish staff observe different bank holidays).
Rollout
The Monday rollout had three steps: a CSV import of the team list and balances, a Slack message announcing the new flow, and the old spreadsheet renamed to DEPRECATED — DO NOT EDIT.
New tool for booking time off and hybrid days. /pto request in Slack, manager approves with a button, calendar updates. Old spreadsheet is archived.
Three people booked their first request in the first 20 minutes. By Wednesday, nobody was using the spreadsheet. By Friday, the People Operations Lead had stopped fielding "is X off?" Slack DMs. Total rollout time: four days.
What they use most
The hybrid-day toggle (daily)
The studio runs on three in-office days a week. Before Vacation Flow, office occupancy would swing from 35 people to 12 people without warning, depending on who had quietly worked from home that day.
Now I can see on the calendar that we're going to have eight people in on Tuesday because three are on leave and four are working from home. That changes the meeting I'd been about to schedule.
The leave-distribution view (weekly)
The People Operations Lead checks the leave dashboard every Monday. Who hasn’t taken any leave in 60+ days? Who has booked time around a deadline they’d already flagged as critical?
The dashboard isn't an HR tool. It's a management tool. I look at it when I'm planning the next quarter — who's going to need a break, who's going to be exhausted by the launch.
Calendar sync (essential)
The agency runs on Google Workspace. Approved leave drops into both the personal calendar and the shared studio calendar — so if someone's on leave when a client asks for a call, the producer sees the conflict before the call gets booked.
The numbers
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| People Ops time on PTO admin | ~6 hrs/week | ~1 hr/week |
| Lost or delayed approvals | 1–2 per month | 0 in 90 days |
| Days since last leave per team member | untracked | tracked, with 4 flagged as overdue at any time |
| Accuracy of next-day in-office count | anyone's guess | within 2 people of actual |
Five hours a week back in my calendar, plus a leave-distribution view I check before every quarter. That's worth what we pay for it about ten times over.
What's next for them
The agency expects to grow to 60 people by year-end. Their priorities for the platform:
- Microsoft Teams integration for finance hires who won't be on Slack.
- Approval delegation during senior leave (the studio has already had one director-on-leave / another-director-buried-in-a-pitch scenario).
- Project tagging on PTO so leave shows up in the context of which client work it affects.