Business tool builder

Every time-off request in one leave tracker
with the balance right beside it.

Describe how your company books time off and Netiva’s agent builds a web app where staff request leave, managers approve and every decision moves the balances and the team calendar.

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Starter prompt

Build a leave request tracker for a 60-person company. Staff sign in, pick a leave type and dates, and see the working days the request uses and the balance left before they send it. Managers open one queue of pending requests, each showing who else on that team is already off those dates, and approve or decline with a note. Keep annual leave, sick, unpaid and parental leave as separate types with their own entitlement and carryover cap, and track carried over, accrued, booked and taken per person per year. Add a month calendar of who is away by team and a balance report for HR.

Build it in Netiva Paste the prompt into a new workspace and adjust it to your business.
Overview

Who this leave tracker is for

Time off is still booked by email at plenty of small companies: a message to a manager, a reply that never comes and a spreadsheet tab HR rebuilds every quarter. Nobody agrees on how many days are left, two of the three people who cover Fridays book the same week, and days that should have expired in March are still being claimed in July. A leave tracker built with Netiva keeps requests, approvals, balances and a who’s-away calendar in one place, so staff, managers and payroll all read the same numbers.

Key features

What your leave tracker can do

  • Requests that count the days

    Staff pick a leave type and a date range on a phone or a laptop. The form works out the working days it uses, drops the public holidays once you add that list, allows a half day at either end and shows what would be left.

    • Working days counted from each person’s work pattern
    • Half days at the start or the end of a range
    • Balance remaining shown before the request is sent
    • Opens in a phone browser, with nothing to install

  • One approvals queue per manager

    Managers sign in to a single list of what is waiting on them, longest first. Each row carries the dates, the days it costs and anyone else on that team already off, so cover is never a guess.

    • Approve or decline with a note kept on the request
    • Overlapping absences on the same team flagged in the row
    • The employee gets the decision by email
    • Canceling a future booking puts the days back

  • A calendar of who is away

    Approved leave lands on a month calendar bound to the requests collection and filtered by team or location. The company view shows that someone is away and whether it is a full or part day, not which type of leave it is.

    • Pending requests shown as provisional until they are decided
    • Part days marked apart from full days, and the holidays once you load them
    • A Monday email of the week ahead for each team
    • Saved filters by team or location; leave type stays in the collections grid

  • Balances you can explain

    Every person and leave type has one line per leave year: carried over, accrued, booked, taken and what is left. When someone asks why the number moved, the requests behind it are one click away.

    • Accrual per pay period, per hours worked or granted in full
    • Booked days and taken days counted separately
    • A carryover cap and an expiry date per leave type
    • Opening balances filled across rows by the collection assistant
Data model

The collections behind it

Netiva keeps your records in built-in collections. Here’s a starting structure — the agent adapts it to your prompt, and you can change it any time.

Employees

Everyone who can book time off, and the manager whose queue their requests land in.

  • Full name (required) Text
  • Sign-in email (required) Used to sign in and to send decisions and reminders Text
  • Team (required) Groups the calendar and the cover check Text
  • Work location (required) Which office or country this person works from; drives entitlement and the holiday list Text
  • Approver (required) Whose queue this person’s requests land in; the owner points at themselves Relation to Employees
  • Working days (required) Mon–Fri, or the days worked, e.g. Mon, Tue, Thu Text
  • Hours per day Used by leave types tracked in hours Number
  • Employment start (required) First-year entitlement and accrual start here Date

Leave types

The kinds of leave you offer and the rule behind each one.

  • Name (required) Annual leave, sick, unpaid, parental, bereavement Text
  • Unit (required) Days or hours Text
  • Paid (required) Yes or no; unpaid types still need a record Text
  • Annual entitlement The full-time figure for this type; each Balances line carries the pro-rated grant Number
  • Accrual (required) Granted in full, per pay period or per hours worked Text
  • Carryover cap Most that can move into the next year; blank for none Number
  • Carried days expire When carried days are dropped, e.g. March 31 Date
  • Note required after Days of absence after which HR asks for a certificate, requested outside the app Number

Requests

One record per booking, from the draft to the decision that settles it.

  • Employee (required) Relation to Employees
  • Leave type (required) Relation to Leave types
  • First day (required) Date
  • Last day (required) Date
  • Days requested (required) Working days in the range, minus any public holidays you load; part days count 0.5 Number
  • Part days None, first day, last day or both; each half day counts 0.5 Text
  • Status (required) Draft, pending, approved, declined or canceled Text
  • Decision note The approver’s note to the employee, with the date the request was settled Paragraph

Balances

A line per person, leave type and leave year, so any number can be traced back.

  • Employee (required) Relation to Employees
  • Leave type (required) Relation to Leave types
  • Leave year (required) The year the line covers, e.g. 2026 or Apr 2026–Mar 2027 Text
  • Carried over Brought in from last year, already capped Number
  • Accrued (required) Granted or built up so far this leave year Number
  • Booked Approved days still in the future Number
  • Taken Days already used Number
  • Adjustment A correction, such as a bought-back day or time off in lieu Number

Required field. Types are Netiva collection field types.

Screens

Pages and screens to start with

A typical first version. Ask the agent for more, or annotate the preview to change any of them.

  • Book time off

    Pick a leave type and dates, see the working days it uses, the balance that would be left and who else on the team is already off.

    Signed-in users

  • My leave

    Balance by leave type, requests still waiting on a manager, days already taken and future bookings this person can cancel.

    Signed-in users

  • Approvals

    The requests that name the signed-in manager as approver, longest waiting first, each row showing the cover left on that team.

    Signed-in users

  • Team calendar

    A month of approved and pending absence by team and location, showing full or part days and the holidays you load, with the leave type left off the company view.

    Signed-in users

  • Request detail

    The dates, the working days behind the number, which days were taken as half days, the balance it draws on and the decision with its note.

    Signed-in users

  • Balance report

    Carried over, accrued, booked, taken and remaining for a manager’s own team, ready for the payroll cycle; the whole-company view stays a saved view in the collections grid.

    Signed-in users
How it works

From prompt to a live leave tracker

  1. Describe how leave works here

    Tell Netiva which leave types you offer, whether each runs in days or hours, who approves for each team and when your leave year starts. The agent drafts collections for employees, leave types, requests and balances.

  2. Load people and opening balances

    Enter teams, approvers and this year’s carried-over and accrued figures in the collection grid, or ask the collection assistant to draft the rows and fill the same field across everyone at once.

  3. Run one request end to end

    In the live preview, book a week as an employee, approve it as the manager and watch the balance and the calendar move. Annotate anything that behaves differently from your policy and the agent changes it.

  4. Publish it to the whole company

    Publish in one click, share the link so staff can sign in, then switch on the decision emails and the Monday digest. Every later change is checkpointed, so an edit you regret rolls straight back.

Why Netiva

Netiva vs a traditional build

Building a leave tracker with Netiva compared with a traditional build
Criterion With Netiva Traditional build
Booking a day off A request that counts its own working days, records the decision and moves the balance and the calendar An email to a manager, a verbal yes and a spreadsheet tab updated whenever someone remembers
Year-end carryover Carried over, accrued, booked and taken kept per person, with days above the cap listed before they expire A December recount of everyone’s remaining days from payroll exports and memory
Getting started Describe what you need in chat and watch it take shape in a live preview Hire developers, or stitch together templates, plugins and a hosting plan
Content and data Built-in collections with nine field types, bound straight to your pages Set up and connect a separate database or CMS
Making changes Ask the agent; every change is checkpointed and reversible File a ticket, wait for a sprint, redeploy
Hosting and domain Global hosting and automatic SSL; connect a custom domain from the Starter plan Buy hosting, then install and renew SSL certificates yourself
Code ownership Clean production code you own and can export Locked into a template, plugin or agency setup
Examples

Ways teams use it

  • A 15-person agency

    The founder approves everything, so there is one queue rather than five. What changes is that remaining days stop living in one person’s head: staff check their own balance before they ask, and a deputy clears the queue during the weeks the founder is away.

  • A retailer with hourly staff

    Shop staff work patterns that are nothing like Monday to Friday and book leave in hours. Sick leave accrues with hours worked and stays its own type, so it never quietly eats into the annual leave allowance.

  • A team split across two countries

    Entitlement, the leave year and the holiday list differ by country, so each person’s work location drives both the entitlement behind their balance line and the holidays that come out of the count. One calendar still shows who is away on both sides.

Good to know

Before you build

  • Your policy sets every number

    Entitlement, accrual and carryover follow your policy and local law: the Fair Labor Standards Act requires no paid vacation or sick days, almost all UK workers get 5.6 paid weeks and many US states add sick leave rules. Ask for the holiday list, minimum cover and blackout weeks.

  • Protected leave needs its own type

    Leave with a legal clock belongs in a type of its own. FMLA in the US gives eligible employees up to 12 workweeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period, with its own eligibility tests. Track the dates here and keep the medical paperwork in your HR system.

  • An approvals queue is a view, not a permission system

    A manager’s queue is only a view of the requests naming them as approver — point a team at a deputy while their manager is away. Netiva apps don’t hand out per-user roles, so the shared calendar shows that someone is away, not why: keep sick and parental leave off it.

  • Payroll stays where it is

    The tracker records absence; it doesn’t run payroll or deduct pay. If your payroll or HR provider offers a REST API you can describe that handover to the agent, with the key stored securely. Otherwise, hand payroll a filtered view each cycle.

Compliance note

A leave record says who was away and when, and a sickness reason or a doctor’s note is health information. The request record carries no reason field on purpose — if your policy needs one, keep it optional and free of medical detail, and leave certificates in your HR system. Decide who in HR can open the collections grid, and how long approved requests and any reason text are kept before deletion. Aggregate figures before they go outside HR.

FAQ

Questions about building a leave tracker

How does the app work out how many days a request uses?

It counts the working days between the two dates from the work pattern on the employee record, drops any public holiday on the list you load for that person’s location and takes off a half day at either end if one was asked for — the request records which end. The result is saved on the request, so editing the holiday list later never rewrites leave already taken. The same work pattern pro-rates a part-timer’s entitlement, and their employment start date sets the first-year figure.

Can we track some leave in hours and some in days?

Yes. Each leave type carries its own unit, so annual leave can run in days while sick leave or time off in lieu runs in hours. Hourly staff get an hours-per-day figure on their employee record, and the form uses it to convert a part day. Balances stay separate per type, so two units never add up into one misleading number.

What happens to days nobody uses before the end of the year?

Each leave type has a carryover cap and an expiry date. At year end the app moves up to the cap into the new leave year, writes it into the carried-over column and drops the rest. A screen lists everyone above the cap so you can nudge them early, and an email can go out weeks before carried days expire. Statutory sick leave often carries different rules, which is why it stays its own type.

How do we stop half a team booking the same week off?

Every pending request shows the other absences on that team for the same dates before anyone approves it. You can also ask for a minimum cover number per team, so the app warns when a request would drop that team below it. Blackout periods — a stocktake week, month end, a peak season — can be marked so requests covering them are flagged for a second look.

Can the leave tracker give payroll what it needs each cycle?

Yes. The balance report filters absence by date range, team and leave type, which covers what most payroll runs need: unpaid days, sickness and anything paid at a different rate. Netiva apps can also call a REST API with keys stored securely, so if your payroll or HR provider publishes one, you can describe that handover to the agent instead of rekeying it.

Who can see leave records, and do we own the data?

Each person signs in and sees their own requests and balance, and a manager’s queue is a view of the requests that name them as approver. The records sit in your own app: Netiva writes clean production code you can read, edit and export whenever you want, and every change is checkpointed, so a bad edit rolls back.

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Drafted with AI assistance from Netiva’s product pages and reviewed by the Netiva team. Example data models, screens and prompts are illustrative starting points, not customer projects.

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