We’re between HR people at work and so I’ve had to do payroll this month and am ready to punch the person who created the software we use for absence tracking. Can anyone recommend something good and simple?

Excel 🙂

You say ‘website’ – I’d be wary of storing any personell data ‘in the cloud’ unless you’re very up on DPA etc.

We use Whosoff.com. no idea what it costs though

Yeah we just use an Excel spreadsheet, tracks holiday, sickness and training on the same sheet (separate tabs for each team as well as a summary one.)

Someone I know has created Leave Wizard which sounds like what you are looking for. I have no direct experience of it but I would trust the guys behind it to develop software for me!

http://www.leavewizard.com/

Absence tracking is fine, has no DPA issues for us. Plus if I was worried about the internet, I’m in the wrong job 🙂

Excel just isn’t practical for self-tracking of 150+ employees over half a dozen countries and offices. Our current system doesn’t give easy exports for the payroll company and took me half a day to manually compile the info. Waste of time when we can pay, say, a few hundred quid a year for something which actually does that for you.

We track around 250 people via Excel, although admittedly we use multiple spreadsheets (by department) so no single one has more than about 70 people on it. Managers have write access, everyone else just read access and it’s stored on SharePoint and needs to be checked out in order to edit. Probably more issues if you don’t have something like SharePoint to host it on though.

Reported.