Holiday plan in a spreadsheet: when it is enough and when it starts costing you

A holiday plan in a spreadsheet has one enormous advantage: it works ten minutes after you create it and nobody needs training. That is why most small companies have one, and why starting there is entirely reasonable.

The problem is that it stops working quietly. It does not break all at once — you simply stop trusting it, until one day the real state of everyone's leave lives in one person's head.

When a spreadsheet is enough

Up to about five people, when one person approves everything and everyone sits in the same room. At that size a spreadsheet is cheaper and faster than anything else. If that is you, do nothing.

What breaks first

The remaining balance. The most common dispute in the whole area. The employee says seven days are left, the sheet says five, and nobody can show where the difference came from — because a spreadsheet shows a result, not a history. There is no trail of who wrote what, and when.

Clashes inside a team. Two people from the same department take the same week. A spreadsheet can show that, but only if somebody looks — and the approver looks when they happen to remember.

Public holidays. Leave from Monday to Friday with a holiday on Thursday is four days, not five. In a spreadsheet somebody subtracts that by hand, every single time. A company with people in two countries is maintaining two holiday calendars.

Who actually approved it. The request arrives by e-mail, the approval leaves by e-mail, and a third person types it into the sheet. Six months later, answering "was this approved?" means searching a mailbox.

What a leave system actually needs to do

It is not much, and it does not require a large HR suite. Five things:

1. The employee files the request themselves — through a form that creates a record, not an e-mail that gets lost.
2. Approval is one click and leaves a trail: who approved, when, and exactly what.
3. The balance calculates itself from entitlement, days taken and approved requests.
4. Public holidays live in the system and are deducted automatically, per the employee's country.
5. The whole team's plan sits on one screen, so clashes are visible at approval time rather than on the first day of absence.

Why ordinary project tools cannot do this

Asana, Monday.com and ClickUp have no absence module. That is not an oversight — HR is a different software category and they do not compete in it. The consequence is awkward, though: the tool you assign work in has no idea the assignee is away next week, so it cannot warn you.

The reverse is equally true. A classic HR system handles leave but knows nothing about tasks and deadlines, so planning stays blind.

How CTM handles it

CTM has both in the same product. An employee files the request online, a manager approves it in one click, the balance recalculates itself, and the public holidays of Slovakia, Czechia and Germany are built in. The whole team's year sits on one screen.

The connection is the point: assign a task to someone with approved leave over that deadline and CTM tells you immediately — not after the deadline passes.

Leave management is part of the Starter plan at 25 EUR a month for the whole company, not per user. For a team of ten that is 2.50 EUR per person per month, which is usually less than the time spent correcting the spreadsheet costs.

In short

A spreadsheet is not a bad tool and there is no reason to abandon it on principle. There is a reason to leave it once you are arguing about balances, missing clashes, and subtracting holidays by hand. That is the point where it stopped saving time and started spending it.