People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

At a 150-person company, you're not the one approving time off — but you're often the one who gets asked 'how much PTO does the team have left this quarter?' by the CEO before a board meeting, or 'can we actually afford to let three engineers go dark in August?' before a product sprint. Paylocity or ADP has the data, but getting a clean answer means logging into a system you're not the daily user of, pulling a report someone else configured, and translating it into a format the exec team can actually act on. Nobody built the cross-functional view. You're the one who builds it.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO dashboard that pulls directly from Paylocity or ADP on a schedule, showing accrued, used, and remaining balances by person, team, and department — formatted so the CEO or a functional lead can read it without asking you to explain it

An automated weekly digest that flags anyone with high accrued PTO balance, upcoming approved leave that overlaps with key milestones, and departments that are understaffed during a given window — delivered to Slack or your inbox every Monday

A custom view you can paste into the board deck or a QBR slide without reformatting: headcount, leave exposure by department, and any scheduled gaps during critical delivery periods

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Scheduling Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, time-off requests, balances, and payroll run data are stored in Starch and refreshed automatically. If your company uses ADP instead, Starch syncs your ADP workers and pay statements on the same schedule. Slack is connected directly so automated digests post to the right channel without manual forwarding. Google Calendar is synced so Starch can cross-reference approved leave against key milestones or exec offsite dates you've blocked.

Prompts to copy

Connect Paylocity and build me a PTO tracker dashboard showing accrued, used, and remaining leave for every employee, grouped by department. Flag anyone with more than 15 days accrued and highlight anyone with approved leave in the next 30 days.

Every Monday at 8am, pull the latest PTO data from Paylocity and send me a Slack message summarizing: total leave scheduled this week by team, anyone with over 20 days accrued, and any department where more than 20% of the team is out simultaneously in the next 4 weeks.

Build me a leave-coverage view for Q3 2026: list every week, show how many people per department are on leave, and flag any week where a department drops below 70% capacity.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity (or ADP) in Starch — Starch syncs your employee roster, time-off balances, approved requests, and payroll runs on a schedule so the data is always current without you logging in.

2 Connect Slack so any automated digest or alert lands in the right channel — typically a private #chiefs-office or #people-ops channel — without you manually compiling and forwarding.

3 Connect Google Calendar so Starch can cross-reference approved leave windows against exec travel, board meetings, or product launch dates you've already blocked.

4 Type your dashboard prompt into Starch: describe the view you want — by department, by accrual level, by upcoming window — and Starch builds it. No drag-and-drop, no pre-built template to wrestle with.

5 Set your alert thresholds: tell Starch what counts as high accrual (e.g., 15+ days), what counts as a coverage risk (e.g., 20%+ of a team out in the same week), and Starch flags those cases automatically.

6 Build the Monday automation: Starch pulls the latest Paylocity data, runs the coverage logic, and posts a structured digest to Slack before your week starts. You read it; you don't compile it.

7 Before a board meeting or QBR, run the leave-exposure view for the next quarter — Starch shows you which weeks have the highest leave concentration by team, so you can surface workforce risk without digging through the HR system.

8 If your CFO or CEO asks a one-off question ('what's the average unused PTO per engineer heading into year-end?'), type it directly into Starch — the agent queries the synced Paylocity data and returns an answer, no ticket to HR required.

9 Use the Task Manager app to track any follow-up actions that surface from the review — for example, 'remind me to flag the August engineering gap to the CTO by June 15' — captured in chat and prioritized in your task list.

10 At end of year, build a summary view: total PTO used vs. accrued across the company, department-by-department, to inform the CFO's accrual liability conversation and your workforce planning for the next year.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q3 2026 capacity review — August coverage gap

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering (32 people)	7
Sales (18 people)	5
Operations (12 people)	4
Product (9 people)	3
Week of Aug 10 — Engineering capacity	78

It's late June. The CEO asks you whether August is safe for the product team to push a major release. You pull up your Starch PTO dashboard: Engineering has 7 people with approved leave in the first two weeks of August, 3 of whom are on the same core infrastructure squad. That's 78% capacity on a team the release depends on — below your 80% threshold. Sales has 5 people out the same window, which is fine since it's a slow pipeline month. You clip the weekly capacity view into the planning doc, flag the engineering gap to the CTO with a Task Manager reminder set for July 2, and tell the CEO: release in the third week of August, not the first. That answer used to take you 45 minutes of Paylocity exports and spreadsheet formatting. It took 4 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO accrual liability by department (total days accrued × average daily cost) — relevant for CFO year-end reporting

Leave concentration risk: percentage of any team out simultaneously in a given week, tracked against an 80% capacity floor

Average days used vs. accrued per department, quarter-over-quarter — signals burnout risk or culture issues the CEO needs to know about

Upcoming leave during critical windows: count of approved absences in weeks overlapping board meetings, product launches, or QBRs

Time to answer a people-ops question from the CEO: before Starch vs. after (proxy for your own capacity reclaimed)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Paylocity or ADP native reporting

The data is all there, but the reports are built for HR admins, not for exec-facing summaries — you end up exporting CSVs and reformatting every time someone asks a question.

Spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel) fed by manual exports

Works fine until someone forgets to pull the latest export or the formula breaks; you own the maintenance burden indefinitely.

Rippling or Lattice people analytics

Purpose-built for people ops leaders, not for a chief of staff who needs PTO data combined with calendar, Slack, and project context in one place — and doesn't want another standalone tool login.

Your HRIS vendor's manager dashboard

Usually read-only per-manager views; no way to build a cross-functional coverage model or automate a Monday digest without IT involvement.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use ADP, not Paylocity — does this work?

Yes. Starch syncs your ADP workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule. You'd build the same dashboard and automations on top of ADP data. The prompts you type don't change; just connect ADP instead of Paylocity when setting up.

I'm not the HRIS admin — will I have permission to connect Paylocity or ADP?

You'll need read access to your HRIS to set up the sync. If you don't have it, you'll typically need your HR or IT admin to grant it. Starch's Paylocity and ADP connections are read-only by default, which makes the access request easier to approve.

Can Starch approve or deny time-off requests, or does it only read the data?

Right now the Paylocity and ADP connections are read-only — Starch reads balances, approved requests, and employee data, but doesn't write back to the HRIS. You'd still approve requests in Paylocity or ADP; Starch surfaces the data and automates the reporting layer on top.

Is my employee data secure? Starch isn't SOC 2 certified.

Honest answer: Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your company has a compliance policy requiring SOC 2 for any system that touches employee data, that's a real constraint to check with your IT or legal team before connecting your HRIS. Starch is transparent about this — it's listed in the product's own limit documentation.

Can I combine PTO data with our Google Calendar to see coverage gaps against actual deadlines?

Yes, and this is one of the most useful things to build. Starch syncs your Google Calendar — 12 months back and 3 months ahead — so you can build a view that cross-references approved leave windows against board meetings, launch dates, or exec offsite blocks you've already put on the calendar. Tell Starch what to look for and it flags the conflicts automatically.

What if I want this digest to go to my CEO or a department head, not just me?

You can configure the Slack automation to post to any channel or DM. If you want it to go to a #leadership channel or directly to a specific exec, just specify that when you set up the automation. You can also build a version with different thresholds for different audiences — a tighter summary for the CEO, more detail for the VP of Engineering.