People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Professional Services Founders

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

At a 12-person consultancy, PTO tracking lives in a shared Google Sheet that someone forgot to update in February, a Slack channel called #time-off that nobody checks, and your own memory. You find out a senior consultant is out the same week a client deliverable is due because they mentioned it in passing on a Tuesday call. Paylocity or ADP might hold the official record, but nothing connects that data to your project calendar or utilization picture. You're manually cross-referencing who's available against client commitments every time you staff a new engagement. There's no policy enforcement, no visibility into accrued balances, and no one is reconciling actual days taken against what payroll shows.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO dashboard that pulls approved time-off records directly from your payroll system and maps them against your Google Calendar project commitments, so you see coverage gaps before they become client problems.

An automated Monday morning Slack alert that surfaces who is out this week, who is out next week, and which active client engagements have a consultant unavailable during a key milestone window.

A custom PTO request and approval workflow your team uses instead of the Google Sheet — with running accrual balances, manager notifications, and a log that actually reflects reality at month-end.

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 balances, and approved leave — and connects directly to Google Calendar on a schedule for project and client meeting data. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when the Monday alert fires. Google Sheets (your current tracker) can be connected from Starch's integration catalog as a live query source during the migration period, so historical data doesn't disappear on day one.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker that pulls employee time-off records from Paylocity, shows accrued and used days per person, and flags any week where a consultant is out during an active client engagement pulled from Google Calendar.

Create a weekly automation that runs every Monday at 8am, checks who is out this week and next from our Paylocity data, cross-references our Google Calendar for client deliverable dates, and posts a summary to our #staffing Slack channel.

Build a PTO request form my team can fill out in Starch. When submitted, add it to the Paylocity record, notify the relevant project lead via Slack, and add the dates to our shared Google Calendar automatically.

Show me a dashboard of remaining PTO balances for each consultant, sorted by who has the most accrued, with a flag on anyone over 15 days so we can proactively schedule time off before it becomes a liability.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity — Starch syncs your employee roster, PTO policies, accrual balances, and approved time-off entries on a schedule. This becomes the authoritative data source, replacing the Google Sheet.

2 Connect Google Calendar — Starch syncs events 12 months back and 3 months ahead, so it can see which consultants have client calls, delivery dates, or travel blocks in any given week.

3 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so Starch can post to your #staffing or #time-off channel when someone requests leave or when a coverage gap is detected.

4 Describe your PTO dashboard in plain language: tell Starch you want to see each consultant's accrued days, used days, scheduled days, and remaining balance in one view, broken out by month.

5 Build the coverage-gap detection logic — tell Starch to flag any calendar week where a consultant is on approved leave AND has a client commitment (identified by a calendar keyword like a client name or project code) during that same window.

6 Set up the Monday morning automation — Starch checks Paylocity leave records and Calendar events, builds a plain-English summary of the week's absences and any at-risk deliverables, and posts it to Slack at 8am.

7 Build the PTO request surface — a simple form in Starch where a consultant submits dates and leave type. On submission, Starch creates the Paylocity entry, notifies the project lead in Slack, and blocks the dates on the shared Calendar.

8 Import your existing Google Sheet history by connecting it from Starch's integration catalog as a live-query source. Ask Starch to reconcile the sheet data against current Paylocity balances and flag any discrepancies for your review.

9 Set an accrual-liability alert — tell Starch to flag anyone carrying more than 15 unused days so you can proactively schedule time off before it hits your balance sheet as a growing liability.

10 Use the Task Manager app to create a recurring monthly task reminding you to review PTO balances before invoicing week, so you catch any payroll adjustments before they affect cash flow reporting.

11 Once the workflow is live for 30 days, ask Starch to show you utilization-adjusted availability — who is nominally available versus who is realistically billable after subtracting approved leave and internal commitments.

12 Share the PTO dashboard link with your operations or finance lead so they can pull it directly before staffing new engagements, removing you as the bottleneck in the staffing conversation.

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

May 2026 staffing crunch — catching a coverage gap before it hits the client

Sample numbers from a real run

Senior Consultant A — approved PTO (May 12–16)	5
Client Larkin & Associates — quarterly strategy delivery (May 14)	1
Remaining PTO balance for Senior Consultant A	9
Consultants with 15+ accrued days flagged for scheduling	3

On Monday May 5th, Starch's weekly Slack post lands in #staffing at 8am. It shows Senior Consultant A is on approved leave May 12–16, pulled from Paylocity. Cross-referencing Google Calendar, Starch flags that Larkin & Associates has a quarterly strategy delivery meeting on May 14th — a meeting where Senior Consultant A is the named lead. Without this, you would have found out on May 13th when the client emailed asking where the deck was. Instead, you have nine days to reassign, prep a backup consultant, or reschedule the client call. The same Monday post shows three other consultants are each carrying more than 15 days of accrued PTO — a growing liability Starch calculated from Paylocity balance data — and suggests the next two low-client-load weeks in June as windows to schedule it before fiscal year-end.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO liability balance per consultant (accrued days × daily rate) — tracked monthly before invoicing week

Coverage gap incidents caught in advance vs. discovered day-of — target zero same-week surprises

Utilization rate adjusted for approved leave — billable hours available vs. hours sold, by consultant

Time-off request-to-confirmation cycle — how many days from submission to calendar block and Paylocity entry

Accrual overage count — number of consultants above your policy cap at any given month-end

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity native time-off module alone

Paylocity tracks balances and approvals but has no connection to your project calendar or client commitments, so a coverage gap is invisible until someone misses a deadline.

Google Sheet + Slack #time-off channel

Free and familiar, but entirely manual — balances go stale, approval chains are informal, and there's no way to cross-reference who's out against what's due that week without you doing it by hand.

BambooHR or Rippling

Purpose-built HR platforms with polished PTO workflows, but they don't know about your client calendar or project commitments, and at 12 people you're paying for features built for a 60-person company.

Float or Resource Guru

Good at visual resource scheduling but requires manual data entry and doesn't pull live from Paylocity, so your leave records and your scheduling tool are always slightly out of sync.

Notion HR template

Flexible and zero cost, but Notion doesn't automate Slack alerts, doesn't sync with Paylocity, and the policy enforcement is whatever the last person to edit the page decided it was.

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

Does Starch actually write back to Paylocity, or is it read-only?

Starch's scheduled sync with Paylocity is read-only — it pulls employee records, balances, and approved leave on a schedule. The PTO request workflow Starch builds can route approvals and trigger notifications, but the actual Paylocity record update would require a separate step or a browser-automation flow. Worth being clear about that before you decommission the direct Paylocity entry process.

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 are all available. The PTO dashboard and coverage-gap automation work the same way; you'd just connect ADP instead of Paylocity in the setup step.

Our project calendar is a mix of Google Calendar and Notion project pages. Can Starch see both?

Yes. Starch syncs Google Calendar on a schedule (12 months back, 3 months ahead) and syncs Notion pages and databases on a schedule. You'd describe which Notion databases hold your project timelines and Starch will pull from both when building the coverage-gap logic.

Is this going to replace our HR system?

No, and it shouldn't. Paylocity or ADP stays as your system of record. What Starch adds is the layer that connects that data to your project calendar, your Slack, and your own custom dashboard — so you stop manually translating between systems every time you staff a new engagement.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have an enterprise client who will ask.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your client requires that certification for any tool that touches HR or employee data, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap, but Starch won't claim it before it's done.

What if we want to see historical PTO data going back two years for a compensation review?

Starch is built for live data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing. It syncs recent and current Paylocity data on a schedule. For a two-year historical pull, your Paylocity export or a connected Google Sheet with your historical records would be the right source — and Starch can query that Sheet live as part of a broader dashboard.