People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You run cohorts solo or with one helper. When a teaching assistant takes a week off or you need to block out a retreat week before your next launch, there's no system — you're scanning a Google Calendar, hoping nothing is double-booked, and manually rescheduling 1:1 coaching calls one by one. You don't have HR software because you're not a company with an HR department. Paylocity is overkill. A spreadsheet works until the moment a sub-contractor forgets to mark their unavailability and three students show up to a live session nobody is running. You need visibility into who is off, when, and what sessions need coverage — without buying enterprise software built for a 200-person org.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Educators, Coaches, and Course Creators2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A running log of your own blocked weeks, contractor unavailability, and student-facing blackout dates — all synced from Google Calendar so nothing lives only in someone's head

Automated alerts that fire when a scheduled live session, coaching call, or cohort event lands on a blocked date, so you catch conflicts before students do

A lightweight task list that turns every coverage gap or reschedule decision into a tracked action item with a due date and priority level

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 connects directly to Google Calendar (scheduled-sync provider — events synced on a schedule, 12 months back and 3 months forward) and Calendly (scheduled-sync provider — bookings and events synced automatically). The Task Manager app tracks every conflict as a P1 action item. The Scheduling app surfaces your live availability rules so your booking page stays accurate without manual updates.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO and blackout-date tracker for my education business. Pull events from my Google Calendar, flag any week where I or a contractor has marked unavailability, and show me a monthly view of who is off and which live sessions or 1:1 coaching calls are at risk.

Create a task for me every time a live cohort session or coaching call lands on a blocked date. Set priority to P1, due date to three days before the conflict, and include the session name and the affected student Calendly bookings.

Show me all Calendly bookings in the next 30 days that overlap with blocked weeks on my Google Calendar, and list them in a table with student name, session type, and booking time.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch will pull your events — including any 'Out of Office,' retreat blocks, or contractor unavailability you've added — on an ongoing schedule so the data is always current.

2 Connect Calendly as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs your bookings and event types so it knows exactly which student calls, discovery sessions, and group coaching slots are on the books.

3 Open the Scheduling app and describe your availability rules in plain language: which weeks are launch weeks (high-touch, no PTO), which are off-weeks between cohorts, and which days you block for curriculum writing.

4 Tell Starch to build a monthly blackout calendar that overlays your Google Calendar blocks with your Calendly booking load, so you can see at a glance where conflicts exist before they hit a student.

5 Set up an automation: 'Every Sunday evening, check my Google Calendar for any blocked days in the next 14 days, cross-reference against my Calendly bookings, and create a P1 task in Task Manager for each conflict with the student name and session type.'

6 For contractor or TA unavailability, ask a contractor to add their off-time to a shared Google Calendar you own. Starch picks it up automatically on the next sync — no new tool, no form to fill out.

7 Use Task Manager to handle the downstream work: rescheduling emails to students, updating your Calendly availability window, or flagging that a live session needs a guest host. Each action becomes a tracked task with a due date.

8 Before each cohort launch, run a prompt like: 'Show me every live session date for Cohort 7 and flag any that land within three days of a blocked week or public holiday.' Catch the problem in planning, not the week before.

9 If you use Notion to document your cohort calendar or curriculum schedule, connect Notion from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can cross-reference session dates against your master planning doc when you ask it to.

10 At the end of each cohort, ask Starch to summarize how many sessions were rescheduled, which weeks had conflicts, and whether your off-time blocks held — so you can plan the next cohort calendar more accurately.

11 Share your Scheduling booking link — kept accurate by Starch's live Google Calendar sync — in your student welcome email and community so nobody books a call during a week you're offline.

12 Review the Task Manager weekly completion view each Friday to confirm all reschedule tasks were handled before the next cohort week begins.

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

Cohort 6 Launch Week Conflict — April 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Blocked week (founder retreat)	5
Live group coaching sessions at risk	3
1:1 Calendly calls booked during block	7
P1 tasks auto-created in Task Manager	10
Conflicts resolved before student notification	10

You scheduled a 5-day founder retreat for April 14–18 and blocked it on Google Calendar. Cohort 6 was already sold, with three live group coaching calls on April 15, 16, and 17 — and seven students had booked 1:1 calls via Calendly that same week. Starch's Sunday evening automation caught all ten conflicts on April 7, created 10 P1 tasks in Task Manager (one per affected booking, with student name and session type), and set due dates for April 10 — giving you three days to reach out before anyone was blindsided. You rescheduled the group calls to April 22–24 using the Scheduling app's rescheduled-availability flow, updated your Calendly window to close April 14–18, and sent a short email to the seven 1:1 students. Zero students showed up to an empty room. The retreat happened. The cohort stayed on track.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Number of student-facing sessions rescheduled per cohort (target: fewer than 2)

Conflicts caught before student notification vs. caught after (you want 100% before)

Days between a blackout block being added to Google Calendar and all downstream Calendly conflicts being flagged

Percentage of contractor unavailability entered more than 7 days in advance

Cohort completion rate on weeks following a PTO or blackout period (to check whether schedule disruption hurts student progress)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Calendar + spreadsheet

Works for one person until you have contractors, multiple session types, and 50+ student bookings — then conflicts only surface when a student complains.

Calendly alone

Calendly closes your booking window when you block availability, but it doesn't cross-reference your session schedule or alert you to conflicts already in the calendar.

Rippling or Gusto

Full-featured HR PTO tracking built for teams with payroll — far more than a solo educator needs, and priced accordingly.

Notion PTO table

A Notion database can log unavailability, but it won't automatically cross-reference Calendly bookings or create tasks for conflicts without manual checking.

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

I don't have employees — I have one part-time TA and a few guest coaches. Does this still work?

Yes. The simplest approach: have each contractor add their unavailability to a shared Google Calendar you own. Starch syncs that calendar on a schedule and can flag any of their blocked days that overlap with sessions they're responsible for. No HR software, no employee records — just calendar events.

Does Starch connect to Kajabi or Teachable to pull session schedules?

Kajabi and Teachable are reachable through Starch's integration catalog (3,000+ apps, queried live when your automation runs) or via browser automation if a direct API connection isn't available. For most education founders, the session schedule already lives in Google Calendar, which is the simpler starting point — Starch syncs it directly on a schedule.

What if I want Starch to automatically email students when a session is rescheduled?

Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider (Starch can send email, not just read it) and describe the automation: 'When a session is rescheduled, draft an email to the affected students with the new date and a Calendly link to rebook.' Starch builds it. You review the draft before it sends, or set it to send automatically once you're confident in the logic.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm cautious about connecting student calendars and booking data.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. That's worth knowing if your education business operates under specific data compliance requirements. For most solo coaches and small cohort businesses, it's not a blocker, but we want to be honest about where things stand.

The Task Manager app says it's currently in development. Can I still use it?

Task Manager is in beta — you can request access. In the meantime, the same conflict-flagging automation can push tasks to a connected tool like Notion or Asana (both reachable from Starch's integration catalog) until Task Manager is fully live for your account.

How is this different from just blocking my Calendly availability manually before a retreat?

Manual Calendly blocking closes new bookings — it doesn't catch bookings already made before you updated the window, and it doesn't flag live sessions that were scheduled on your cohort calendar weeks ago. Starch cross-references what's already booked against what's newly blocked, so you're not relying on memory or a weekly calendar scan to catch the gaps.