At the service company Alty, we have found Tempo Timesheets to be great for logging employees' work and using the approved timesheets as the basis for invoicing our customers. We've been using Tempo for more than 4 years now, and we are pleased with our experience so far.
But after we adopted Tempo Timesheets, we realized that one of our pains remained unaddressed — employee’s leave management. Tempo add-on was not providing comprehensive leave management tools, and using something outside of Jira would be a step back for us. We needed to have both our employees’ work logs and leave logs in one place — ideally, somewhere in Jira. That’s why we decided to create our custom solution — Jira Cloud add-on for vacations and sick days management called Leave Tracker.
It was designed to be simple and effective while fully compatible with native Jira work log manager or add-ons like Tempo Timesheets. Leave Tracker uses regular Jira issues to store the vacation and sick day logs. Therefore it does not conflict with Tempo approvals flow. With Leave Tracker, admins can see the employees’ work logs and their leave logs together on a single screen.
The development of Leave Tracker ended in 2018, and it was published on the Atlassian Marketplace right after. With this release, we didn’t only solve our internal pain, but we also made our product available for other Jira Cloud users.
Since the release date, we have received a lot of useful feedback from the Marketplace users. It made us figure that some of the suggested features may work great for our internal process, too. We iterated on Leave Tracker a couple of times, adding new features and extending its capabilities.
We returned to the idea of further growing the product this year when the rapid growth of Alty has posted some new challenges and requirements for our leave management process. The biggest features that we are going to develop during 2021:
- leave approvals — team managers and Jira admins will be able to approve the vacation requests right from the interface of the Leave Tracker
- custom leave types — apart from the default “vacation” and “sick day,” it will be possible to create some custom types like “unpaid leave,” “parental leave,” etc.
- radical architecture changes — we are going to completely rethink the architecture to significantly shorten the application load times, thus allowing us to handle more employees’ logs in less time
- further setup simplifications — we’ll automate the creation of the special Jira projects and nested issues, allowing for an even simpler initial setup of the Leave Tracker
We have a few more ideas up our sleeve and encourage the community to let us know how they handle the leave management in their companies and what additional features would they love to see in the Leave Tracker. Please let us know in the comments below!
