People & HR

How to track pto and time off on Starch

People & HR15 roles covered3 Starch apps

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PTO and time-off tracking is one of those workflows that feels trivial until it isn't. When your team is small, you're probably doing it in a shared spreadsheet, a Slack thread, or someone's head. That works until someone takes a week off that collides with a deadline, a contractor submits hours that don't match what you approved, or you realize at year-end you have no idea what balances are owed. The specifics vary — what this looks like for a five-person services firm is different from a 30-person operator with hourly staff — but the underlying problem is the same: time-off data lives somewhere fragmented, visible to no one who needs it at the moment they need it.

On Starch, you describe the tracking surface you want — balances by employee, requests by status, who's out this week, what's pending approval — and that view exists. If you're connected to Paylocity or ADP, Starch syncs your time-off data on a schedule, so balances and approvals stay current without anyone exporting a report. If you're running a lighter system or tracking manually, Starch can build a custom app that holds the record. Either way, what you end up with is a single place where you can see who has PTO outstanding, who's scheduled out in the next two weeks, and whether any requests are still waiting on you — without digging through inboxes or chasing anyone down.

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People & HR15 roles covered3 Starch apps

Context

Why it matters

Why this is hard today

Time off affects scheduling, payroll, and headcount coverage — three things that cost you real money when they go wrong. An unapproved absence during a critical delivery window, a payout miscalculation at termination, a compliance issue because your accrual policy wasn't tracked consistently: these are expensive mistakes that compound with team size. Getting this right means you're never surprised by who's out, your payroll inputs are accurate, and your team knows the process is fair because it's visible.

Watch out for

Common pitfalls

Where this usually goes wrong

The most common mistakes: (1) Treating approval as tracking — someone says 'approved' in Slack and assumes that's recorded, but there's no running balance or audit trail. (2) Letting balances drift from actual payroll data, so what's in your spreadsheet and what ADP or Paylocity shows diverge by year-end. (3) No policy for part-time or contract staff, so edge cases get handled ad hoc and inconsistently. (4) Reviewing the data too infrequently — checking balances quarterly when absences happen weekly means you're always reacting.

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