If you run a small business with a handful of staff, there's a good chance you're managing annual leave the same way you did five years ago — a shared spreadsheet, a group WhatsApp message, maybe a paper form on the noticeboard.
It works. Sort of.
Until someone books the same week as three other people and you only find out when half the team doesn't show up on Monday. Until you can't remember whether someone used their carry-over days. Until a new starter asks how much holiday they have left and you have to open a spreadsheet, squint at a formula, and hope it's still right.
That's the moment I started building Absently.
The problem with how most small businesses manage leave
I want to be clear about something: I'm not talking about big companies with dedicated HR departments. They have systems. They have people whose job it is to know this stuff.
I'm talking about the business owner who also handles the payroll, answers the phones, and somehow has to remember that Dave booked the second week of August three months ago. The office manager holding it all together with a colour-coded spreadsheet and sheer willpower.
For teams of five to fifty people, leave management is one of those tasks that never quite gets solved. It just gets managed. Badly, manually, and usually at the worst possible moment — when someone's asking for time off and you have no idea who else is already out.
The existing software options didn't help either. Most leave management tools are built for companies with proper HR teams — they're expensive, complex, and full of features that a 15-person business will never use. You either end up paying for something you barely touch, or you carry on with the spreadsheet and hope for the best.
What Absently actually is
Absently is a simple leave and absence management tool built specifically for small UK businesses.
Not a watered-down enterprise product. Not a bolt-on module inside some enormous HR platform. Just a clean, focused tool that does one job well: letting your team request time off and letting you manage it, without the admin overhead.
With Absently, your team can log in, see their remaining leave, and submit a request in under a minute. You get notified, you can see who else is off at the same time, and you approve or decline it — all without opening a spreadsheet or digging through a thread of emails.
That's genuinely it. The goal was to remove the friction, not add more of it.
Who it's for
Absently is built for businesses roughly in the five to fifty employee range — small enough that a heavyweight HR system feels like overkill, but big enough that tracking leave in a spreadsheet has started to feel like a liability.
If any of these sound familiar, it's probably for you:
- You've had at least one awkward conversation because two people booked the same week off
- You're not entirely sure how many days someone has left this year
- You've had to chase someone down to find out if they actually booked that holiday or just mentioned it in passing
- You've realised mid-December that someone hasn't taken any leave and is now trying to use twelve days before the year ends
It's also for the person in the team who ends up managing this stuff — which in a small business is usually the owner, an office manager, or someone who quietly inherited the spreadsheet and never quite handed it back.
What makes it different
A few things we've been deliberate about:
Simplicity over features. We haven't tried to build every feature under the sun. Absently does the core job — annual leave, sick leave, the leave types your business actually uses — and it does it cleanly. You shouldn't need a training session to get started.
Pricing that makes sense for small teams. Most leave management software charges per employee, per month, which sounds fine until you realise you're paying for twelve people when you only have eight. Absently's pricing is designed to be fair and predictable for teams that aren't going to double in size next quarter.
No credit card needed to try it. You get 30 days free, no card required. If it's not right for you, you haven't lost anything except a bit of setup time.
UK-first. Bank holidays, statutory leave entitlements, carry-forward rules — these are all built around how leave actually works in the UK, not adapted from a product designed for another market.
A word on where we are
Absently is in early access. We're working with a small group of businesses right now — learning how they use it, fixing the rough edges, and making sure the core experience is genuinely good before we open it up more widely.
If you're a small UK business currently managing leave in a spreadsheet or by email, and you want to try something better, I'd love to hear from you. We're still taking on founding members — a small group of early businesses who get lifetime access in exchange for honest feedback and the occasional call.
You can read more about that here, or just drop me a line at hello@absently.io.
No sales pitch. Just a founder who'd like to know if we've built something useful.
Absently is leave management software for small UK businesses. Simple, fairly priced, and built to replace the spreadsheet.