People & HR

How to track pto and time off as CPG Founders

People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a CPG brand with a team of 8 and no dedicated HR function. PTO tracking lives in a shared Google Sheet that someone last updated in October, or in a Slack DM thread that's impossible to search. When a co-packer visit conflicts with your ops manager's vacation, you find out day-of. Paylocity or ADP might hold the official records, but you're not logging in every time someone asks 'how many days do I have left?' — and your employees aren't either. Accrual policies differ by state, tenure, and role, and you've got no system flagging when someone's carrying 30 days and you've got a liability sitting on your books.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor CPG Founders3 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A real-time PTO dashboard pulling directly from your Paylocity or ADP data so any team member can see their current balance, pending requests, and upcoming approved time off without calling you

An automated weekly digest that surfaces scheduling conflicts between employee time off and critical production runs, co-packer windows, or distributor deadlines

A documented PTO policy in your team wiki so seasonal hires, brokers, and part-time staff can self-serve answers instead of asking you

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

Knowledge Management Task Manager Scheduling

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule — employee records, time-off balances, approved requests, and payroll run data — so the tracker stays current without manual exports. Google Calendar is also synced on a schedule so the conflict-detection automation has visibility into your operational commitments. Notion connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query it live when building or updating your Knowledge Management wiki pages. Slack connects from Starch's integration catalog to deliver the weekly digest to your ops channel.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker that pulls employee balances and approved time off from Paylocity, shows me a calendar view of who's out each week, and flags any week where more than 2 people from the same function are off at once

Create a Knowledge Management page with our PTO policy — accrual rates by tenure tier, blackout windows around Q4 holiday production, how to submit a request — and set a reminder to review it every 6 months

Set up a Monday morning automation: pull the current week's approved time off from Paylocity, check it against our Google Calendar for co-packer calls and retailer meetings, and Slack me a summary of any conflicts

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs employee records, PTO balances, accrual data, and approved time-off requests automatically — you're not doing manual CSV exports.

2 Tell Starch: 'Build me a PTO dashboard showing each employee's current balance, accrued YTD, used YTD, and any pending requests.' Starch builds the app from that description — you can refine the fields and layout from there.

3 Add a conflict-detection layer: 'Flag any week where we have a co-packer production run scheduled in Google Calendar and more than one person from ops or supply chain is approved for PTO.' Starch checks the calendar sync against the Paylocity data on a schedule.

4 Set up the weekly Slack digest: every Monday at 7am, pull this week's approved time off, cross-reference against the production calendar, and post a summary to #ops-team. Starch automates this without any coding.

5 Open the Knowledge Management app and tell it: 'Create a PTO policy page covering our accrual schedule by tenure tier, the Q4 blackout window, how employees submit requests, and what happens to unused days at year-end.' Paste your existing policy doc or describe it from memory — Starch structures it.

6 Add your state-specific rules if you operate in California or another state with mandatory PTO payout laws. Tell Starch: 'Add a California section noting that unused PTO must be paid out at termination — flag any employee with a balance over 15 days.'

7 Set a stale-content alert on the policy page: 'Remind me to review this page every April and October, and flag it as outdated if it hasn't been edited in 8 months.' Knowledge Management tracks this automatically.

8 Use Task Manager to track PTO-related to-dos: 'Remind me to audit PTO liability before the Q3 board deck — due August 15.' Capture it in chat and it appears in your P1 queue with a due date.

9 For seasonal hires and part-time brokers, add a lightweight onboarding path in Knowledge Management: 'Build an onboarding checklist for seasonal warehouse staff that includes the PTO policy page, our attendance expectations during peak season, and who to contact for schedule changes.'

10 If you use a time-tracking tool like Toggl or a scheduling tool your co-packers use that doesn't have a direct sync, tell Starch: 'Automate checking [that site] weekly for updated shift schedules and pull the data into a summary.' Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed.

11 At quarter-end, run: 'Show me a summary of total PTO hours used this quarter by department, compared to last quarter, and flag anyone carrying more than 20 days of unused balance.' This surfaces compensation liability before your accountant asks about it.

12 Share the booking link from the Scheduling app with your team for PTO pre-approval conversations: set a 'PTO Request Review' meeting type (15 minutes) with buffer time on either side, so employees can book a slot without the back-and-forth.

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

Summer 2026 peak-season PTO audit — 8-person CPG team

Sample numbers from a real run

Ops Manager — approved PTO balance	12
Production Coordinator — approved PTO balance	8
Sales Lead — approved PTO balance	5
Warehouse (2 seasonal) — combined days outstanding	3
Conflict weeks flagged (co-packer + PTO overlap)	2

It's July 7 and you've got a co-packer run scheduled July 21–23 for your Q3 production batch — 40,000 units of your reformulated sauce line. Starch's Monday morning digest fires and flags a problem: your ops manager has approved PTO July 20–24, and your production coordinator submitted a request for July 22. That's both people who own the co-packer relationship out during the same three-day window. You see it on Tuesday. You have two weeks to either reschedule the production run, negotiate coverage, or ask one of them to shift dates. Without the automated conflict check, you'd have found out July 20 when no one showed up to the pre-production call. The digest also surfaces that your sales lead is carrying 5 unused days with a year-end use-it-or-lose-it policy, and your Q4 blackout window starts November 1 — giving you a natural prompt to remind her to schedule them in September before the holiday ramp.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO liability in days per employee (especially in California where unused PTO must be paid out at termination)

Conflict rate: number of production-critical weeks per quarter where a key ops or supply chain person is out

Time-off request turnaround: average days from employee request to founder approval

Blackout compliance: percentage of Q4 PTO requests that fall outside the defined blackout window

Policy self-service rate: reduction in 'how many days do I have left?' Slack messages per week

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity or ADP built-in PTO module

Holds the data but requires employees and managers to log in separately, doesn't cross-reference your production calendar, and gives you no automated conflict alerts or digest — you have to pull reports manually.

Google Sheets PTO tracker

Free and familiar but instantly goes stale once one person stops updating it, has no connection to payroll truth, and gives you no automated anything — you're doing all the coordination in your head.

BambooHR or Rippling

Purpose-built HR tools that handle PTO well, but they're standalone HR platforms that don't connect to your production calendar, co-packer schedule, or the rest of your CPG ops stack — so PTO conflicts still get caught manually.

Notion or Confluence wiki (manual policy doc)

Works for documenting policy but has no live connection to actual balances, no stale-content detection, and no ability to auto-update when your policy changes — it's a document, not a system.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — knowledge management, task manager, scheduling 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 the same way?

Yes. Starch syncs your ADP data on a schedule — workers, org units, and pay statements — the same way it does with Paylocity. You connect it once, and the PTO dashboard and conflict-detection automation pull from whichever payroll provider you're on.

What if our PTO policy is different for full-time vs. part-time vs. seasonal hires?

Tell Starch that when you describe what to build. 'Build a PTO tracker where full-time employees accrue 1.25 days per month, part-time employees accrue 0.5 days per month, and seasonal hires are on a fixed 3-day bank with no carryover.' Starch builds the logic from your description. You can always refine it.

Can employees see their own PTO balance without me sharing my whole dashboard?

You can build a separate view for employees — 'Create a read-only employee-facing view that shows each person only their own balance, approved requests, and upcoming time off.' Starch can scope it per user. This is a custom app you'd describe and build, not a pre-built template.

Does Starch replace our HR software for PTO management?

No — and it's not trying to. Paylocity or ADP remains the system of record. Starch reads that data, surfaces it in a way that's actually usable day-to-day, and connects it to the rest of your operational calendar. Think of it as the layer that makes your HR data actionable for a founder who doesn't have an HR team.

Is my employee data secure? Is Starch SOC 2 certified?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet — that's worth knowing if your company has strict compliance requirements. There's no on-prem or self-hosted option. For a small CPG team using this for internal operations visibility, most founders find it within their risk tolerance, but it's an honest limit to name.

What if our co-packer schedule isn't in Google Calendar — it's in emails or a shared Excel sheet?

You have two options. If your co-packer has a web portal or sends structured emails, Starch can automate reading that source through your browser — no API needed. Or you can keep a simple Google Calendar as your production calendar and let Starch sync from there. It doesn't have to be the system your co-packer uses; it just needs to be somewhere Starch can reach.