If you manage a small team, there is a reasonable chance your staff holiday planner is a spreadsheet. Maybe a colour-coded one you are quietly proud of. Maybe one inherited from whoever had the job before you, full of formulas nobody wants to touch.
Either way, you are not alone. Most small businesses track leave in Excel, and for a team of five to fifteen people, it is a perfectly workable solution, as long as it is set up properly.
This post comes with a free download: a clean, ready-to-use staff holiday planner Excel template, built specifically for small UK businesses. No email address required, no strings attached.
Download the free staff holiday planner template (Excel)
What is included in the template
The template has three planner sheets, each covering a different leave year:
- January 2026 - for businesses whose leave year runs January to December 2026
- April 2026 - for businesses whose leave year runs April 2026 to March 2027 (the most common alternative, aligning with the financial year)
- January 2027 - for planning ahead into next year
Pick the tab that matches your leave year start date and use that one. You can ignore the others.
Each sheet is fully self-contained. Everything you need is on one view: the leave key, setup instructions, employee details, and the full year calendar side by side. No jumping between sheets, no complex setup process.
How to set it up
Setting up the planner takes about five minutes for a team of ten. Here is the order to do it in:
Step 1: Enter your employee details. On your chosen sheet, columns A to C (highlighted in green) are where you enter each employee's name, annual leave allowance in days, and any carry-forward days from the previous leave year.
Step 2: Check the public holidays. Each sheet comes pre-filled with England and Wales public holidays for the relevant year. If you are in Scotland or run a non-standard bank holiday arrangement, find the P entries in the calendar and amend them accordingly.
Step 3: Enter any leave already taken. If you are setting this up mid-year, go through the calendar and enter codes for leave already taken. The leave key is shown on the left side of each sheet:
- A - annual leave
- S - sick leave
- P - public holiday
- T - TOIL (time off in lieu)
- M - maternity or paternity leave
- O - other or custom leave
Cells in the calendar use dropdown selection for the leave codes, so you can pick from a list rather than typing each time.
Step 4: Share it with your team. If you want employees to be able to view their own information, share the file with read-only access. For most small teams this is enough.
The limitations of an Excel planner, and when to look beyond it
This template is genuinely useful for small teams, and it is free. But it is worth being honest about where spreadsheet-based leave management runs into problems.
It relies on everyone updating the same file. If two people edit it at the same time, or someone saves over a version, things go wrong. Manageable for a team of five, harder as you grow.
There is no approval workflow. The planner records leave, but it does not handle requests and approvals. Someone still has to check availability, approve the request, and remember to update the file. That process usually lives in email or a WhatsApp thread.
It does not handle complexity well. Part-time workers on different patterns, mid-year starters, employees with different allowances are all manageable in Excel but require careful maintenance and tend to be the first things that go wrong.
None of these are reasons not to use a spreadsheet, especially if you are a small team and the admin overhead is low. But they are worth knowing about, because they tend to be the things that eventually push people to look for something better.
What UK staff holiday planners need to cover
Whether you use a spreadsheet or dedicated software, your leave planner needs to handle the following:
Annual leave is the core entitlement: 5.6 weeks per year for full-time employees, 28 days including bank holidays. Your planner needs to track allowance, days taken, and remaining balance per person. If you need to work out a pro-rata entitlement for a new starter or part-time employee, our holiday entitlement calculator does this automatically.
Bank holidays need to be visible in the planner. England and Wales have eight bank holidays in 2026. Scotland has nine. If bank holidays come out of the annual leave allowance rather than being given on top, this matters a lot for accurate balances.
Carry-forward is increasingly important since the 2024 rule changes. Employees who could not take leave due to sickness or parental leave can carry over up to 28 days into the following leave year. The template has a column for this for each employee.
Sick leave should be tracked separately from annual leave. Logging sickness as annual leave is a common mistake and a legally problematic one. Our guide to sick leave vs annual leave explains why. The template has a separate S code for this reason.
Other leave types such as TOIL, parental leave, compassionate leave, and jury service should all be visible in the planner even if their balances are tracked separately.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use this template for part-time employees?
Yes. Enter the employee's pro-rata allowance in the allowance column rather than the full-time equivalent. If you need to calculate what their allowance should be, our holiday entitlement calculator works this out automatically based on their start date and working days per week.
What if my leave year starts on a different date?
The three tabs cover the most common leave year start dates: January and April. If your leave year starts on a different date, the April tab is the most adaptable. Simply adjust the column headers manually to reflect your actual months.
Can I add more employees?
Yes. Copy any existing employee row in the calendar section and insert it below the last employee, then add their details in the green columns on the left.
The public holidays are wrong for my region. How do I fix them?
Find the cells marked P for the dates you want to change and delete the P. The cell will revert to a blank working day. For Scotland's additional bank holidays (2 January and St Andrew's Day on 30 November), add P in the relevant cells.
A note on software
If the spreadsheet is already causing you problems - requests going missing, balances going wrong, too much time spent on admin - it is probably time to look at a proper leave management tool.
Absently is built for exactly the situation this template serves: small UK businesses that need something better than a spreadsheet but do not want the complexity or cost of a full HR system. It handles requests, approvals, and balances automatically, for £1 per person per month.
You can try Absently free for 30 days with no credit card required. Or if you are one of our first users, take a look at our founding membership programme, where a small number of lifetime accounts are available in exchange for honest feedback.
Download the free staff holiday planner template (Excel)
The template is provided free with no conditions. If you find it useful, we would love to know. Drop us a line at hello@absently.io.