Tracking employees PTO/Vacation Time off in jira

Question

Hi, we have used jira for some time and its amazing with some creativity what you can do. There was one thing i was wondering if anyone had any good apps or ways to help employees track their time off. We give each employee several weeks to use each year at their discretion and they keep track of it on their own. It would be cook if users could log time off whether full or partial days to help them and management keep track of time off that has been taken. Let me know if you have any good ideas for how to pull this off.

Thanks,

Thomas Chung_bgmiwu · Answer

Hi @Jon ,
I ran into the same thing. The simplest route is a dedicated Jira project with a basic workflow (Requested, Approved, Taken) and custom fields for leave type, start date, end date. Works fine for small teams but gets messy fast. No calendar view, no balances, and your boards get cluttered with PTO issues.
A lot of teams end up with a Google Sheet alongside it. That usually drifts out of date quickly.
If you want something purpose-built, Tempo has PTO as part of their time tracking suite. I also built one called TeamOps that does leave and onboarding together without creating Jira issues, free for small teams. Worth browsing the Marketplace to see what fits your setup.
Whatever you go with, the key thing is getting people out of Slack DMs and into a real request/approval flow.

Jon_4n6t23 · Answer

None of these apps is a great fit. Has anyone ever just built their own way of tracking this with making a new project, workflow, and issues that pertain to this? It doesnt need to be anything that special just to keep track of how much time each person has taken off over the course of a  year.

Jaime Capitel (resolution) · Answer

Hi @Jon

Happy to hear you're enjoying Jira! It's definitely flexible 😄

I'd like to add Out of Office Assistant to the list, which will prove very helpful if you want to make sure that issues are reassigned to a backup person when your users go on leave.

We also have an integration with Tempo (the leader in time tracking for Jira), which means that using both apps combined you'd only need to maintain leaves in Tempo.