People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Small Law and Accounting Practices

People & HRFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

At a six-attorney or four-CPA firm, PTO tracking lives in three places simultaneously: a shared Google Sheet nobody updated since February, an Outlook calendar with entries like 'Sarah – OOO?' and a paralegal who mentally tracks who's out so she can reroute client calls. When a partner takes a half-day for a closing or a tax deadline falls during a junior associate's vacation week, nobody finds out until a client calls asking where their document is. Paylocity or ADP might hold the official record, but nothing surfaces conflicts against the actual work calendar. Year-end PTO carryover calculations get reconstructed manually, usually in November, usually wrong.

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People & HRFor Small Law and Accounting Practices2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO dashboard that pulls directly from Paylocity or ADP and cross-references your Outlook or Google Calendar so you can see who's out, when, and what client matters or tax deadlines overlap with their absence

An automated weekly digest — sent to your office manager or managing partner every Monday — showing approved time off for the next two weeks, flagged against any deadline or court date in the calendar

A task-capture workflow so coverage assignments ('Alex covers Brennan matters while she's out July 14–18') are logged with due dates and don't live only in someone's head

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

Task Manager Scheduling

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule (employees, time-off requests, approved leave, pay periods). Starch connects directly to Outlook — syncing messages and calendar events on a schedule — so the PTO dashboard can cross-reference leave dates against actual calendar entries. For firms using Google Calendar, Starch connects directly to that on the same scheduled-sync basis. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when sending weekly digests.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker that pulls employee time-off requests and approved leave from Paylocity and shows them alongside our Outlook calendar events for the next 30 days. Flag any day where more than one timekeeper is out and a calendar event involving a client or court date exists.

Every Monday at 8am, send me a Slack message or email summarizing approved time off for the next two weeks, and list any Outlook calendar events on those days tagged as 'client meeting,' 'filing deadline,' or 'court.'

Create a task for each coverage assignment when someone's leave is approved — assign it to the covering attorney or CPA with the leave start date as the due date and P1 priority if a client deadline falls during the absence.

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Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP — Starch syncs your employee roster, approved time-off requests, and leave balances on a schedule. If your HR system isn't Paylocity or ADP, check whether it's reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps, or Starch can automate it through your browser if it's web-based.

2 Connect Outlook or Google Calendar — Starch syncs calendar events on a schedule, including events created by any attorney or CPA on the shared firm calendar. Tag your calendar event types consistently ('client meeting,' 'court,' 'filing deadline') so the conflict-detection logic has something to work with.

3 Describe the PTO dashboard you want in plain language: which fields matter (attorney name, leave type, dates, coverage assigned), what a 'conflict' means at your firm, and how you want it sorted.

4 Starch builds the dashboard surface. Review it — if you want to add a column for 'matter number' or filter by practice group (litigation vs. tax, for example), just tell it what to change.

5 Set up the Monday morning digest automation. Tell Starch: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull approved leave for the next 14 days from Paylocity, cross-reference with Outlook calendar events, and send me a summary via Outlook email.' Starch writes and schedules this automation from that description.

6 Add a coverage-assignment trigger: when a leave record is approved in Paylocity and a calendar conflict is detected, Starch creates a Task Manager entry for the managing partner to assign coverage, with the leave start date as the due date.

7 Use the Task Manager to capture coverage assignments as they're made — 'Alex Reyes covers all Donnelly estate matters July 14–18, P1' — so there's a written record that isn't buried in an email thread.

8 For firms tracking billable-hour targets alongside PTO, describe a secondary view: 'Show me each timekeeper's approved PTO days this year next to their YTD billable hours so I can see if anyone is pacing short because of leave concentration.'

9 If your HR portal (Paylocity, ADP, or otherwise) also handles PTO request submissions, Starch can automate the web form submission through your browser — no separate API integration needed — so approval workflows can be triggered from within Starch.

10 At year-end, run the carryover reconciliation: tell Starch 'Pull all approved leave by employee from Paylocity for the calendar year, calculate remaining balances against each employee's accrual policy, and flag anyone with more than 40 hours of unused PTO.' This replaces the November spreadsheet rebuild.

11 Share the PTO dashboard link with your office manager or paralegal so the person who currently holds this knowledge in their head has a system they can actually trust and update.

12 Review and adjust quarterly — if the firm adds a partner or changes its PTO policy, describe the change to Starch and the dashboard updates to match.

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Worked example

Summer Coverage Gap — July 2026 Tax Filing Season

Sample numbers from a real run

CPA on approved PTO July 7–11 (Maria Chen)	5
CPA on approved PTO July 10–14 (David Park)	5
Overlapping days with both out	2
Client filing deadlines in that window (extensions + quarterly estimates)	4
Coverage assignments created as tasks	4

On June 30, the Monday digest fires and flags a problem: Maria Chen and David Park have overlapping approved PTO July 10–11, and Starch found four Outlook calendar events in that window tagged 'filing deadline' — two extended corporate returns, one partnership, one quarterly estimate for a real estate client. Without this view, the managing partner would have found out July 9 when a client called. With it, she has a week to assign coverage: she tells Starch 'Create a P1 task for each of the four deadlines, assign to James Ito, due dates matching each filing date, and note that Maria's files are in the Karbon project 2024-Corp-Hendricks and 2024-Corp-Alvarez.' James gets the task list on July 7 when he comes in. No client call. No reconstructed context. The paralegal didn't have to track any of it.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO conflicts with client deadlines or court dates per quarter (target: zero surprises)

Year-end unused PTO hours per timekeeper vs. firm carryover cap

Time from leave approval to coverage assignment (target: same business day)

Percentage of coverage assignments captured in writing vs. verbal-only

Hours spent on PTO reconciliation at year-end (baseline vs. after Starch)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity or ADP built-in time-off calendar

Shows who's out but has no awareness of your client deadlines, court dates, or Outlook calendar — the conflict-detection you actually need doesn't exist there.

Shared Outlook calendar with manual OOO entries

Every attorney or CPA has to remember to enter their own leave, there's no cross-reference against HR records, and year-end reconciliation is still manual.

Karbon or TaxDome work management

Strong on tax workflow and deadline tracking but not designed as a firm-wide PTO and coverage system; you'd need a separate HR integration that neither product provides out of the box.

BambooHR or Gusto

Good standalone HR and PTO tools, but they don't connect to your Outlook calendar or matter deadlines — so the conflict-detection still requires a human to run the cross-reference.

Excel or Google Sheets

Free and fully custom, but someone has to maintain it, it goes stale within two weeks, and it has no automated alerts when a deadline falls during someone's leave.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — 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 Paylocity for HR but our attorneys track their own PTO in Outlook — will Starch handle both?

Yes. Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule (approved leave, balances, employee roster) and separately syncs your Outlook calendar. The PTO dashboard you describe can pull from both and reconcile them — so if an attorney put 'OOO July 14–18' in Outlook but the Paylocity approval is still pending, Starch can flag that discrepancy rather than silently treating the Outlook entry as confirmed leave.

We're on ADP, not Paylocity. Does that work?

Yes. Starch connects directly to ADP and syncs workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule. The PTO dashboard setup is the same either way — just tell Starch which HR system to connect when you describe what you want to build.

Our office manager submits PTO requests through our HR portal's web interface. Can Starch automate that?

If your HR portal is Paylocity or ADP, Starch syncs the data directly. For other web-based HR portals, Starch can automate the browser interaction — filling out the request form, submitting it — without needing a formal API. Starch automates it through your browser; no API needed.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We handle client data and our bar association takes data security seriously.

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified, and there's no self-hosted option. That's worth knowing upfront. Whether that clears your firm's data policy depends on what data you're routing through Starch — for a PTO and calendar dashboard, you're typically working with employee names, leave dates, and calendar event titles rather than client matter content. But you should verify with your managing partner or IT counsel before connecting client-facing systems.

Can Starch track PTO accruals and carryover calculations, or just show who's approved for leave?

Starch syncs the data your HR system (Paylocity or ADP) holds — approved leave, balances, accrual records. If your HR system tracks accruals, Starch can surface them. Year-end carryover calculations can be described as a custom view: tell Starch what your firm's carryover policy is and it will build the calculation on top of the synced data. It won't replace your payroll system as the source of truth, but it will save you the November spreadsheet rebuild.

We use Clio or MyCase for matter management, not QuickBooks. Can the PTO dashboard still cross-reference matter deadlines?

Starch connects to 3,000+ apps through its integration catalog. Clio and MyCase are web-based practice management tools — if they're in the integration catalog, the agent queries them live when your dashboard runs. If they're not listed, Starch can automate them through your browser. Either way, you can describe what you want: 'When a timekeeper is approved for leave, check their open Clio matters for any deadlines in that window' — and Starch builds the cross-reference.