People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Event Agency Founders

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

You're running a team of 4–8 event staff — coordinators, day-of crew, part-time setup help — and tracking who's off when lives in a group text, a sticky note on your monitor, or a Google Sheet nobody remembers to update. When a coordinator takes a Friday off during a weekend wedding push, you find out when they don't show up to the walkthrough. Paylocity or ADP exist if you're a 200-person company; most small event agencies are just crossing their fingers and manually reconciling hours against whatever HR function the founder happens to be playing that week. There's no system — just you asking 'are you available that Saturday?' over and over again.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

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

Outcome

What you'll set up

A centralized PTO tracker that shows every team member's upcoming time off alongside your live event calendar, so you never staff an event short-handed

An automated alert that flags scheduling conflicts when a team member's time-off request overlaps with a confirmed event date

A knowledge base entry for your PTO policy and approval workflow so new hires can self-serve the answer instead of texting 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

Scheduling Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Google Calendar via scheduled sync, pulling events 3 months ahead so the PTO tracker can cross-reference confirmed event dates in real time. Calendly connects from Starch's integration catalog, queried live to surface any bookings your coordinators have accepted. The Knowledge Management app stores your PTO policy and onboarding docs — no external sync needed, it lives in Starch.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker for my event agency team. Each entry should have: staff member name, requested dates, event conflicts (cross-referenced with my Google Calendar), approval status, and notes. Flag any request that overlaps with a confirmed event date.

Create a knowledge base article explaining our PTO policy: requests must be submitted 3 weeks in advance, blackout dates exist for event weekends, and approval comes from me. Include a section on how to submit a request and what happens if a conflict is found.

Add a recurring weekly task every Monday: review pending PTO requests and check for event-date conflicts before approving or denying.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Google Calendar — Starch syncs your events on a schedule, including all confirmed event dates, venue walkthroughs, and client calls up to 3 months ahead.

2 Connect Calendly from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query live bookings your team members have accepted on your agency's scheduling links.

3 Open the Scheduling app and set availability rules for yourself — block out event weekends so clients can't accidentally book discovery calls the day you're running a 300-person gala.

4 Describe your PTO tracker to Starch in plain language: who's on your team, what fields you need per request, and what a conflict looks like (any request overlapping a Google Calendar event tagged as a confirmed event).

5 Starch builds the PTO tracker app. Each submission shows the requested dates, the staff member's name, and a live conflict check against your synced Google Calendar.

6 Open the Knowledge Management app and tell Starch: 'Write a PTO policy doc for my event agency — 3-week advance notice required, blackout dates during confirmed event weekends, all requests approved by the founder.' Starch drafts it; you edit and publish.

7 Add a second Knowledge Management article: 'How to submit a PTO request' — step-by-step, linked to whatever channel you use (email, a form, a Slack message). New hires read this instead of texting you.

8 Set up a Task Manager reminder that fires every Monday morning: 'Review this week's open PTO requests and check for event conflicts before approving.' Capture it via chat in Starch.

9 When a coordinator submits a time-off request, log it in the PTO tracker app. The conflict check runs against Google Calendar automatically — you see immediately if that weekend has a confirmed event.

10 If a conflict surfaces, the task fires a follow-up: reach out to the coordinator, find coverage, and update the event staffing notes in the same app.

11 At the start of each month, pull up the PTO tracker filtered by the next 6 weeks and cross-reference against your upcoming confirmed events — use this as your staffing readiness check before finalizing day-of teams.

12 As your team grows, publish the PTO policy and request process to the shared Knowledge Management space so every new hire onboards themselves without a 20-minute phone call with you.

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

April–May 2026 Spring Wedding Block

Sample numbers from a real run

Confirmed events in window	6
Team members (coordinators + day-of crew)	7
PTO requests submitted for April–May	4
Conflicts flagged by tracker	2
Requests approved without conflict	2

You have 6 confirmed events between April 12 and May 31 — three Saturday weddings, a corporate dinner on a Thursday, and two venue walkthroughs mid-week. Four team members submit time-off requests for this window. When you open the PTO tracker, two requests are immediately flagged: your lead coordinator wants April 26 off, which is a Saturday wedding for 180 guests at a vineyard venue, and a setup crew member requested the May 3 weekend, which overlaps with your highest-contract-value booking of the quarter. The other two requests — a Tuesday and a random Monday — show no conflicts and get approved in 30 seconds. You reach out to the lead coordinator, she shifts her request to the following Monday, and you update the staffing note in the tracker. No one shows up short-handed. The whole resolution loop — flag, confirm, reassign, approve — takes 12 minutes instead of the usual chain of texts that bleeds into a client call.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Staffing conflict rate: percentage of confirmed events that had a last-minute coverage scramble due to untracked PTO

PTO request lead time: average days between submission and event date (target: 21+ days)

Policy self-serve rate: how often new hires find the PTO policy in the knowledge base vs. ask you directly

Open PTO requests older than 72 hours: count of requests pending approval beyond your 3-day SLA

Event weekends with full staffing confirmed 2 weeks out: target 100% for Saturday events

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Google Sheets + group text

Free and familiar, but the sheet goes stale the moment someone forgets to update it — and there's no automated conflict check against your event calendar.

Gusto or Rippling

Full-featured HR platforms with built-in PTO tracking, but priced and scoped for companies with payroll complexity you probably don't have yet — and they won't cross-reference your event calendar.

HoneyBook or Dubsado

Great for client-facing workflows and proposals, but neither has internal HR or staff scheduling — you'd still need a separate system for team time off.

BambooHR

Purpose-built PTO management with approval workflows, but it's a standalone HR system that has no awareness of your event calendar or client deadlines, so conflict detection is still manual.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — scheduling, knowledge management, 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

Can Starch actually see my Google Calendar events to check for conflicts?

Yes. Starch syncs your Google Calendar on a schedule — it pulls events 12 months back and 3 months ahead. When the PTO tracker checks a requested date, it's comparing against that live synced data. You don't have to export anything or maintain a separate events list.

What if my team uses a mix of Google Calendar and Outlook?

Both are scheduled-sync providers in Starch. You can connect your Google Calendar and any team member's Outlook calendar if they grant access, and the PTO tracker can reference either or both when checking for conflicts.

Is there a built-in PTO approval form my team can fill out?

There's no pre-built App Store template for PTO tracking specifically — you'll describe what you want and Starch builds the app for you. That means the fields, the approval flow, and the conflict logic match how your agency actually works, not a generic HR template. The prompt in the recipe above is a good starting point to paste directly into Starch.

Can Starch send my team member a notification when their request is approved or flagged?

You can build an automation in Starch that sends a Gmail or Outlook message when a request status changes — describe it in plain language ('when a PTO request status changes to Approved, send the team member an email from my Gmail account confirming the dates') and Starch sets it up. Gmail is a scheduled-sync provider, so sending from your connected account is supported.

Does Starch store my team's personal data securely? Any compliance certifications?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing before storing sensitive employee records. For a small agency tracking shift availability and time-off dates, that's often fine. If you're processing payroll data or health benefits, use a dedicated HR platform for those records and keep Starch focused on scheduling visibility.

What if a team member submits a PTO request verbally or by text — can that still go into the tracker?

You or the team member can log it manually in the Starch app in seconds. If you want to formalize it, you can also describe an automation: 'When someone fills out this Google Form, create a new PTO request entry in the tracker.' Starch can query Google Sheets or Forms from its integration catalog to pull submissions in automatically.