Employee Leave Tracking System

[Rangarajan Parthasarathy]

We are trying to build Employee Leave Tracking System with APPROVAL Workflow for JIRA Cloud. Is there any tool that is available  in marketplace that is FREE? I could not search and find an appropriate one.

[Thomas Chung]

Aclarification first, since this trips people up: the native approval workflow feature in Jira Cloud lives in Jira Service Management, not in Jira Software team-managed or company-managed projects. If you want manager approval as a workflow step, you need JSM. If you don't have JSM, you can simulate it with custom fields and automation, but it's more fragile.

Option 1 - JSM (has approvals natively)

1. Create a service project with the HR template (or a blank project — same outcome)
2. Add a request type called "Leave Request" with fields: leave type (dropdown), start date, end date, reason
3. Configure an approval step on the workflow — approver is either a custom "Manager" user picker field or the submitter's team lead
4. Automation for status-change notifications: to the manager when submitted, to the employee on approval/rejection

 
Option 2 - Jira Software without JSM

1. Company-managed project with a workflow: Open → Pending → Approved → Done (you can add Rejected as a terminal state)
2. Custom field for the approver
3. Automation: on submission, email the approver; on status change to Approved, email the employee and CC HR
4. Use Issue Security to prevent team members from seeing each other's requests

 
What you won't get natively in either path: 

• Leave balance tracking. Jira has no built-in concept of PTO balances. You can add a "days remaining" custom field per employee and update it via automation, but the math gets gnarly with partial days, holiday overlap, and accrual periods.
• Team calendar view. Issues display on calendars, but there's no "who's out today" summary without building a JQL filter + dashboard gadget yourself.
• Public holiday awareness. Manual to maintain.

For a team under 10 people, Option 2 is serviceable. The moment leave balance reconciliation starts costing more than 1-2 hours a week of HR's time, it's worth looking at apps.

[Richard]

What if after the Manager has approved the Leave request, how would you do it if you want the approved request to then auto forward to the HR Manager?

[Yogesh Mude]

HI @Rangarajan Parthasarathy

I would say to track the employee leave on Jira there is no need to have a third paid/free plugin.

You can configure custom workflow with the different steps like open, pending approval, approved, on leave etc.

Once done you can create different custom fields like Approver, backup person etc and configure it on the screen.

While creating an issue for leave by the employee, it should show a custom screen with the different custom field like approver etc.. once provided the required information this issue will auto assign to the approver and approver should approve it.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

[Mirek]

It depends on your requirements. I think you are easily able to build a simple Approval workflow with couple of custom fields and make from this a Leave request that people would use. You do not need to use any tools for that.

However if you want to make it more flexible or "fancy" solution with automatons etc. then it is more complicated. For server JIRA there is a plugin for that that cover many dependencies, show charts etc. - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1216410/vacation-manager-for-jira