How to Track Vacation Time at Your Creative Agency

The holiday season is just around the corner and your staff is probably submitting vacation requests to you as you read this. Most agencies will have a process in place for the submission of vacation requests. However, you may want to take a few extra steps to assist in the tracking and management of vacation time.

Function Point recommends creating tasks to track paid time off (PTO Tasks). You should assign a task to each staff person that is created on January 1 and has a due date of December 31. They should have a budgeted amount of hours that represents the total vacation time available to the person in the calendar year. Example: if a person has 2 weeks of vacation time available in the year and they work 40 hours per week, the task should have a budget of 80 hours. When the staff person goes on vacation, they enter 8 hours against the task for each day that they are gone. This helps both administration and the staff person to know how much vacation time has been used and how much is still available.

It is also important to enter their vacation time in your agency management system’s work calendar. This ensures that the staff person will show as unavailable in your resource management tool. You don’t want a traffic manager accidentally assigning tasks to a designer who’s going to be away. They would have to be pretty committed to the agency if they’re working while lying on the beach. If they are, give them a raise!