TimeTally - Timesheet Management AppTimeTally
Holiday tracking for UK hotels and venues

Leave Management for Hospitality Teams

Manage holiday requests around peak seasons, calculate pro-rata entitlements for part-time staff, and keep your restaurant, hotel, or bar fully staffed. Leave management in hospitality has to cope with housekeeping, front desk, night porters, F&B and events crew on one staff list, often across more than one property. Casual banqueting staff accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours they work, salaried duty managers take their allowance upfront, and both sit in the same leave management system. If you run a single-site pub or restaurant specifically, see our dedicated pub and restaurant leave management page. Replace WhatsApp messages and paper diaries with proper leave management. Timesheets are included in the same £3 per employee per month, alongside your hospitality timesheets.

Try Free for 14 Days Book a Demo
A front desk team member selecting days off and a leave type on their phone

“The app is simple to use, reliable, and makes managing holidays, absences, and staff records straightforward. The system has saved us a significant amount of administration time.”

CLI ManchesterJordan Ingoe, CLI Manchester

Staff pick their days and the request reaches the duty manager

Housekeepers, receptionists, night porters and banqueting staff pick days from a three-month calendar. Their remaining holiday balance is on the same screen and the request lands in the manager's queue — the same leave request process on a phone as on a desk.

Booking time off in TimeTally: three months of dates, the leave type grid, and a submit button

  • Three months on one screen

    A night porter can see the conference season and the week after it without scrolling

  • Tap the days, get a count

    Selected dates are totalled as they are picked, and weekends are left out

  • Choose the leave type

    Annual, sick, maternity, paternity, TOIL, or a type you added for the property

  • Add a reason and submit

    The request reaches the duty manager with the dates, the type and the day count on it

Proper leave requests, not WhatsApp messages

Staff submit holiday requests through the app or web browser. Managers get notified instantly and can check the team calendar before approving. Everything is logged — no more “I thought I had that day off” arguments.

  • Request from their phoneStaff submit requests via the iOS app between shifts — no need for a computer
  • One-tap approvalApprove or reject with a reason, so staff know where they stand immediately
  • Clear audit trailEvery request, approval, and rejection is recorded — no more he-said-she-said disputes
  • Book on someone's behalfA manager can book leave for one employee or several at once, which covers the request phoned in during a function
Leave requests Get Started
A member of staff picking days off and a leave type on their phone

Open the request before you decide on it

A request opens to a single panel: who asked, their job title, the status, the leave type, the number of days it comes to, and the first and last date. A duty manager can read the whole thing on a phone at the desk and approve or reject it there.

  • The day count is worked out for you, so a Tuesday-to-Saturday request does not have to be counted off a wall planner.
  • A rejection can carry a written reason. A commis chef turned down for a wedding weekend knows why, and it stays on the record.
  • Employees can ask to change or cancel leave they have already had approved, and a manager approves or denies that separately.
  • Booking leave for someone else counts as the approval, which is what you want when a housekeeper phones in a request mid-shift.
A hotel manager approving a three-day annual leave request, showing the dates, the leave pay and Approve and Reject buttons

Track every type of absence

Create unlimited custom leave types to match your business needs. Annual leave, sick leave, unpaid leave, compassionate leave — each with its own colour on the calendar and optional allowance. Everything is tracked in one place.

Use our sick leave tracker to maintain a complete sickness history for every employee, and export data for SSP calculations or payroll processing.

  • A type takes a name, an optional description, one of seven colours and one of eight icons, so it is readable at a glance on the calendar.
  • Two switches decide the maths: whether the type is paid leave, and whether it deducts from the annual leave balance.
  • A type can instead carry its own balance, set in days or hours per year, which is how a lieu day for a worked bank holiday stays out of the holiday figure.
  • If you track hours, approved overtime converts to TOIL at a rate you set — a double shift over a conference given back as a day in the low season.

Popular with hospitality teams:Create separate leave types for “Unpaid Leave” and “Lieu Days” alongside standard annual leave, so you always know the reason behind each absence.

The leave types list, each type with its own colour and set as paid or unpaid

See who is off before you approve

The team calendar shows approved leave at a glance. Before approving a request, check how many staff are already off that day — and make sure you have enough cover for service. Letting staff see it is a setting an admin turns on, and you can keep it to a person's own department or open it across the whole organisation.

  • Manage peak periods

    See at a glance how many people are off during Christmas, summer, and bank holidays before approving more requests

  • All absence types together

    Holiday, sick leave, and custom types all on one calendar so nothing is missed

  • Multiple locations

    Give each person a department — a venue name works — and view leave for one site at a time or across your whole business

  • Mobile-first for busy managers

    Check the calendar and handle approvals from the floor via the iOS app — no office needed
Three month team calendar showing how many hotel and venue staff are booked off on each day

Every leave scenario a hotel or venue has to handle

Tap a card to read the detail.

Start your free trial

14-day free trial · No credit card needed

Watch a Leave Request Go From Phone to Approved

A short loop of the leave screens. A member of staff taps three days, picks Annual Leave and submits. The request then appears in the manager's time-off queue, is opened for the detail, and is approved.

Back

Book Time Off

Jul 2026

MTWTFSS12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031

Aug 2026

MTWTFSS12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031

Sep 2026

MTWTFSS123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930

3 days selected· excl. weekends

Family holiday, flights booked ✈️

Submit Request Submitted

Leave Allowance

18

days left

Annual Leave Balance

18 days

Annual Leave Used

7 days

All Departments
Jun 2026
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
M
T
AR1

Amelia Roberts

Kitchen

JK2

James Kelly

Front of house

MP3

Maya Patel

Front of house

PS4

Priya Shah

Kitchen

TW5

Tom Wilson

Bar

Timesheet Requests

1
TW

Tom Wilson

37h 30m · Week of Jun 1

Time-off Requests

2
MP

Maya Patel

3d · Annual Leave

PS

Priya Shah

5d · Annual Leave

MP

Maya Patel

Front of house

Pending Approved
Annual Leave
3days

From

Thu, Aug 14

2026

To

Mon, Aug 18

2026

Notes

Family holiday, flights booked

Approve Approved
Reject

Common leave management problems in hospitality

If any of these sound familiar, you need a system that actually works for the pace and demands of hospitality. This page is written for hotels, venues and operators running more than one site. A single-site pub, bar or restaurant is better served by the pubs and restaurants leave page.

Peaks

Everyone wants the same days off

Christmas, bank holidays, and summer weekends — your busiest periods are when everyone wants leave. Without a clear system, it is first to shout loudest, not first come first served.

  • The team time-off calendar shows three months of approved leave, so a duty manager can see the whole conference season before answering the next request
  • TimeTally has no blackout-date feature. A request during a peak is rejected by a person, with a written reason attached to the record
Pro-rata

Pro-rata nightmares

With a mix of full-time, part-time, and variable-hour staff, calculating correct holiday entitlements manually is error-prone and time-consuming.

  • Contracted hours are set for each day of the week, so a three-day housekeeper is not costed like a five-day front desk supervisor
  • Casual events and banqueting staff can be moved onto hours-worked accrual instead, which builds leave from the hours they actually work
Turnover

High staff turnover

New starters arrive frequently, and mid-year entitlement calculations are done on the back of an envelope. Leavers' unused holiday is often not settled correctly.

  • Entitlement is pro-rated from each person's start date, so a March starter is not handed a full year of allowance
  • A leaver's days taken and days remaining are on the record when you work out their final pay
Requests

Requests via WhatsApp or word of mouth

Leave requests come in via text, WhatsApp, or a quick chat during service. Nothing is written down, and managers forget what they have agreed to.

  • Every request, approval, rejection and deletion is stored with a timestamp and the person who made it
  • A manager can book leave for one employee or several at once, for the housekeeper who phones a request in mid-shift
Cover

No view of who is already off

Managers approve leave without checking the rota first. The result: too many staff off on the same day and a scramble to find cover.

  • Approved leave sits in the same calendar as the duty roster, so whoever writes next week's shifts sees it before publishing
  • The team calendar can be scoped to one department or opened across the whole organisation
Sickness

Sick leave goes unrecorded

Staff call in sick and someone covers their shift, but the absence is never formally logged. There is no history to review when patterns emerge.

  • Sick leave is one of the types TimeTally seeds, so a night porter calling in at 5am is recorded rather than remembered
  • Leave analytics break absence down by month, by leave type, by department and by employee
Get Started

The Two Leave Settings a Hotel or Venue Operator Changes First

Most of TimeTally works out of the box. These two are worth ten minutes on setup day, because they are the two that hospitality operators get wrong.

Irregular hours accrual

Accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours casual staff actually work.

Set a person's accrual method to hours worked and TimeTally stops giving them a fixed number of days. Leave is added every time one of their timesheets is approved, at a percentage of the hours on it, and reversed if that timesheet is rejected. In the setup wizard the option reads “Hours worked (zero-hour contract)”.

The rate is 12.07% by default. That is the figure for irregular-hours workers under the rules for leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, and it comes from 5.6 weeks divided by the 46.4 working weeks in a year. You can change it, for the organisation or for one person.

Two real constraints before you pick it. The method is only offered when timesheets are switched on, because the timesheet approval is what triggers the accrual. And choosing it turns TOIL off for that organisation, so a venue that gives lieu days back for overtime should keep salaried staff on upfront accrual and use a custom leave type instead.

The method is set per employee, not per property. A salaried general manager can take a full allowance upfront on the same staff list as an events casual accruing hour by hour. One limit worth stating plainly: TimeTally accrues the entitlement, it does not calculate holiday pay from a 52-week average of earnings. That average is a payroll calculation. Check a figure with the zero-hours holiday calculator.

Departments and multi-site

Group staff by venue, then know exactly what that grouping does.

Every employee takes a department. Use it for the function — Housekeeping, Front Desk, F&B, Events — or for the property, if you run several off one account. The value is copied onto each leave record, so it stays right on historic rows when somebody moves.

Three things then read it. The team time-off calendar can be scoped to a person's own department or opened across the organisation, which is the setting behind a location-wise holiday calendar. Leave analytics break days taken down by department. And the CSV export filters by department, so one venue's leave can be sent to payroll on its own.

Here is the limit, stated plainly rather than buried. TimeTally has two access levels, admin and employee. There is no per-site or per-department role, and an admin's access is organisation-wide, so a general manager you make an admin sees leave for every property on the account. Pay visibility can be hidden from an approver; site visibility cannot.

How leave years, carryover and balances work

Pro-rata calculations done for you

Hospitality teams have a mix of full-timers, part-timers, and staff who joined mid-year. TimeTally handles all the entitlement maths automatically. Accrual method, start date and the pro-rata switch all sit on the employee's own record, and the resulting entitlement and balance are written out in a sentence underneath them.

  • Part-time entitlements

    TimeTally calculates pro-rata holiday based on working patterns. A housekeeper working 3 days a week automatically gets the correct proportion of the allowance you set for the property — 25 days plus 8 bank holidays out of the box, and an admin can change either figure

  • Mid-year starters

    New staff who join partway through the year get their entitlement calculated automatically based on remaining days in the leave year. No manual calculations needed

  • Export for payroll

    Export paid leave hours and cost via CSV, or post them to Xero or QuickBooks as a journal alongside your timesheet figures. No more re-keying holiday information into your payroll system at month end

Check a figure by hand with the pro-rata holiday calculator for part-time patterns, or the zero-hours holiday calculator for casual and irregular-hours staff.

An employee's leave allowance card showing the days left, the annual leave balance and the days already used
UK compliance

Holiday Compliance for a UK Hotel or Venue

TimeTally is a leave tracking tool, not a compliance system. It keeps the record that every one of these obligations rests on. Here is what the data supports across a hospitality operation, and what it does not do.

Statutory Entitlement

Every worker in a UK hotel or venue gets 5.6 weeks of paid holiday, which is 28 days for someone on a five-day week. You set the full-time allowance for the business; TimeTally starts at 25 days plus 8 bank holidays, and an admin can change either figure. TimeTally then works out each person's share of it from their working pattern and their start date. It does not decide the statutory figure for you.

Irregular Hours and 12.07%

For leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024, irregular-hours workers accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours worked in each pay period. That is the rate TimeTally applies when a person's accrual method is set to hours worked, and it is editable. Casual banqueting, events and on-call cover are where this bites in hospitality. The zero-hours holiday calculator checks a figure by hand.

Bank Holidays

There is no right to a paid day off on a bank holiday in the UK, which is why hotels and venues trade them. TimeTally books the correct set for each employee's own country, so an Edinburgh property and a London one on the same account both get the right dates, and you choose per person whether those days come out of the allowance. Days worked in lieu go on a custom leave type of your own.

Sickness Cover

Sick leave is one of the leave types TimeTally seeds, so a night porter ringing in at 5am is recorded rather than remembered. Leave analytics show the pattern by month, type, department and person. TimeTally does not calculate or pay Statutory Sick Pay — use the statutory sick pay calculator for that, the sick leave tracker for how absence recording works, and the Bradford Factor calculator to score short repeated absences.

Records You Can Produce

Every request, approval, rejection and deletion is stored with a timestamp and the person who made it. Balances, entitlement and days taken are held per employee per leave year. If a former head housekeeper disputes their final holiday pay, the record of what they booked and what they had left is there rather than in a diary at reception. Paid leave hours and cost export as CSV or post to Xero or QuickBooks.

What TimeTally Does Not Do

It does not calculate holiday pay from a 52-week average of earnings — that is a payroll job. It has no blackout-date or minimum-cover feature; a peak-period request is refused by a manager, with a reason. It does not chase anyone automatically: there is no scheduled reminder, only a manual nudge you send to one person. And there are two access levels, admin and employee, with no per-venue level in between.

Simple, Transparent Pricing

One price. Every feature. No surprises.

£3/employee/month

Billed monthly, incl. VAT. Cancel anytime.

Holiday tracking — requests, approvals, and balances
Team calendar view — see who is off at a glance
Pro-rata calculations — automatic entitlements for part-timers
Timesheet tracking included — no extra charge
Get Started

No credit card required

Book a Demo

In short

What is leave management software for a hotel or venue?

Leave management software for a hotel or venue records who has booked time off, how much holiday each person has left, and who is already off before a manager approves the next request. TimeTally does this for UK hotels, venues and multi-site operators from £3 per employee per month. Staff book from the iOS app or any browser, in days, half days or hours. Managers approve or reject in one tap, with a written reason on anything sent back. Salaried duty managers take their allowance upfront, and casual events and banqueting staff accrue at 12.07% of the hours they work as their timesheets are approved. Every employee carries a department, which can be a venue name, and the team calendar, the leave analytics and the CSV export all filter by it. Bank holidays are booked from each person's own country. Timesheet tracking is included in the same price.

Price
£3 per employee a month
Booking
iOS app or any browser
Irregular hours
12.07% of hours worked
Units
Days, half days or hours
Multi-site
Filter and export by department
Includes
Timesheets at no extra cost

Frequently Asked Questions

How does TimeTally handle pro-rata holiday for part-time and zero-hour staff?

TimeTally works out pro-rata holiday entitlement from each employee's working pattern and start date. You set contracted hours for each day of the week, so a housekeeper on three days gets the right share of the allowance you have set for the property. For staff with irregular hours — casual banqueting crew, events cover, on-call night porters — set that person's accrual method to hours worked instead. Leave is then added every time one of their timesheets is approved, at 12.07% by default, and the accrual is reversed if the timesheet is rejected. That rate is the one for irregular-hours workers under the rules that apply to leave years starting on or after 1 April 2024, and you can change it. The method is set per employee, so a salaried duty manager taking their allowance upfront sits on the same staff list. One limit is worth stating plainly: TimeTally does not calculate a 52-week average of pay. That is a payroll calculation. Use our zero-hours holiday calculator if you want to check a figure by hand.

Can I block out dates when staff cannot take holiday?

TimeTally does not have a dedicated embargo feature, but managers have full control over approving or rejecting leave requests. You can simply reject requests that fall during peak periods like Christmas or bank holiday weekends, and add a note explaining the reason. The team calendar makes it easy to see how many people have already been approved off during busy periods, so a decision about a wedding weekend or a conference block is made against the real cover figure rather than a guess.

How do hospitality staff submit leave requests?

Staff can submit leave requests via the iOS app or through the web browser. They pick the days from a three-month calendar, choose the leave type, add a reason and submit. Managers receive a notification and can approve or reject with one tap. This is ideal for hospitality workers who may not have access to a computer during their shift but always have their phone — housekeeping, front desk and kitchen staff can all request leave between duties or on a day off.

Can I manage multiple restaurant or venue locations?

Yes, with one limit worth knowing before you set it up. Give every employee a department — Housekeeping, Front Desk, F&B, Events, or the name of the property they work at — and TimeTally uses that value to filter the team time-off calendar, the leave analytics and the CSV export. You can look at one venue at a time or at the whole group. What the department does not do is restrict access. TimeTally has two access levels, admin and employee, and there is no per-site or per-department role in between, so anyone you make an admin sees leave across every venue on the account. Plan your admin list around that rather than assuming a general manager will only see their own property.

Does TimeTally track sick leave for hospitality staff?

Yes. Sick leave is one of the leave types TimeTally seeds, so it is there on the first day. You can add your own types on top, each with a name, an optional description, a colour and an icon. For each type you choose whether it is paid, whether it deducts from the annual leave balance, and whether it carries its own balance in days or hours. Every absence is recorded against the employee and appears in the leave analytics alongside the rest of the team. Paid leave hours and their cost export as CSV, and post to Xero or QuickBooks as a journal alongside your timesheet figures. See our sick leave tracker page for more details.

Is TimeTally affordable for small restaurants and cafes?

TimeTally costs just £3 per employee per month with no setup fees or hidden costs. For a team of 10 staff, that is £30 per month — and it includes both leave management and timesheet tracking. A 40-room hotel running 25 staff across housekeeping, front desk and F&B pays £75 a month for the same feature set. There is a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.

How is hospitality leave different from other sectors?

Hospitality leave clusters exactly when you are busiest — bank holidays, conference season, the run-up to Christmas — so the constraint is cover, not entitlement. TimeTally shows how many people are already approved off for a date before you say yes. For operators wanting location-wise holiday calendars across several venues, group staff by department per site and filter the calendar to it.

Still have a question? See all FAQs

Related Resources

Calculators and guides for hotel, venue and multi-site operators

Staff Holiday Tracker

Balances, bookings and remaining days for the whole teamLearn more

Free Leave Tracker

How leave years, accrual, carryover and balances work in TimeTallyLearn more

Sick Leave Tracker

Record a night porter ringing in and see the pattern behind itLearn more

Zero-Hours Holiday Calculator

Accrued holiday for casual banqueting, events and on-call coverOpen calculator

Pro-Rata Holiday Calculator

Entitlement for part-time patterns and mid-year starters and leaversOpen calculator

Statutory Sick Pay Calculator

Check SSP for a member of staff who is off sick, which TimeTally does not payOpen calculator

Hospitality Timesheets

The hours side of the same £3, and where irregular-hours accrual comes fromLearn more

Duty Roster and Rota Planner

Write the hotel duty roster against the leave that is already approvedLearn more

Absence Management Software

Absence patterns and reporting across housekeeping, front desk and F&BLearn more

Also Explore

Leave Management SoftwareStaff Holiday TrackerAnnual Leave TrackerFree Leave TrackerSick Leave TrackerUnpaid Leave TrackerTOIL Tracker

Explore TimeTally

Leave Tracking SoftwareLeave Request SoftwarePub & Restaurant LeaveHospitality Time TrackingRota PlannerAll Industries

Take control of leave in your hospitality business.

Try TimeTally free for 14 days. Manage holiday requests, calculate pro-rata entitlements, and track sickness absence — all in one simple tool.

Book a Demo Get Started

No credit card required · Free 14-day trial · Cancel anytime