People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Property Management Founders

People & HRFor Property Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

You're managing 200–400 doors with a team of 4–8 people, and PTO tracking lives in a shared Google Sheet that nobody updates until someone's already out. Paylocity or ADP handles payroll, but neither your property managers nor your maintenance coordinators are logging time off consistently — and you find out about coverage gaps when a leasing agent misses a showing or a work order goes unacknowledged for three days. You don't have an HR department. You're the HR department. Every PTO request comes in via text, Slack, or a sticky note on the office whiteboard, and reconciling it with your payroll run at the end of the month is a 45-minute manual exercise you dread.

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People & HRFor Property Management Founders2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A single source of truth for all team PTO — who's out, when, and whether coverage has been arranged — pulled live from Paylocity or ADP with no manual re-entry

Automated alerts when a PTO request conflicts with a high-activity period (month-end close, lease renewal wave, or peak maintenance season) so you know before it's a problem

A task-based coverage checklist that fires whenever someone submits PTO, ensuring the right leasing or maintenance handoffs happen before the person walks out the door

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 Knowledge Management

Data sources & config

Starch connects directly to Paylocity (scheduled sync) to pull employee records, payroll runs, and time-off data on a regular schedule. Task Manager (live) tracks coverage checklists triggered by PTO submissions. Knowledge Management (live) stores your PTO policy, blackout calendar, and handoff templates. If your team uses ADP instead, Starch connects directly to ADP via scheduled sync for the same employee and time-off data. Google Calendar is connected via scheduled sync so Starch can cross-reference PTO against scheduled move-ins, lease expirations, and owner meetings.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker for my property management team. Pull employee records and time-off balances from Paylocity. Show me who's out each week alongside my open work orders and scheduled move-ins so I can spot coverage gaps before they happen.

When a team member submits PTO in Paylocity, create a coverage checklist task in my task manager with P2 priority. The checklist should include: reassign open work orders, confirm showing coverage, notify the owner portal contact if the employee is the primary owner contact, and update the on-call rotation doc in our knowledge base.

Build a knowledge base article template for PTO policy — accrual rates by role, blackout periods during month-end close and peak leasing season, and the coverage handoff checklist every employee must complete before going out.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity or ADP to Starch via scheduled sync. Starch pulls your employee roster, time-off balances, and any approved PTO requests automatically — no CSV exports, no manual entry.

2 Connect Google Calendar via scheduled sync so Starch has visibility into your team's scheduled showings, move-in inspections, owner meetings, and maintenance appointments.

3 Open the Knowledge Management app and describe your PTO policy in plain language: accrual rates by role (property manager, leasing agent, maintenance coordinator, admin), blackout periods around month-end close and peak leasing season (typically May–September for most residential portfolios), and your coverage handoff requirements.

4 Tell Starch: 'Build me a weekly PTO calendar view that overlays who's out against open work orders and scheduled move-ins.' This becomes your Monday morning ops check — one view tells you whether this week has coverage risk.

5 Set up an automation: 'When Paylocity shows a new approved PTO request, create a P2 task in Task Manager titled [Employee Name] PTO Coverage — [Dates]. Attach the coverage checklist from Knowledge Management.'

6 Customize the coverage checklist in Knowledge Management for each role. A leasing agent's checklist looks different from a maintenance coordinator's — the leasing agent needs showing coverage assigned; the maintenance coordinator needs open work orders triaged and an emergency vendor contact confirmed.

7 Tell Starch: 'Alert me via Slack if a PTO request overlaps with month-end close week or the first week of any month, since that's when owner statements are due.' Starch automates this through your browser — no Slack API configuration needed on your end.

8 At the start of each month, run the prompt: 'Show me all PTO taken last month by employee, cross-referenced with their Paylocity time-off balance. Flag anyone who has taken more than their accrued balance.' This is your payroll reconciliation check before you process the run.

9 Use Task Manager to track completion of coverage handoff tasks. Each checklist item is a sub-task with a due date — the day before the employee leaves. You can see at a glance whether handoffs are actually getting done.

10 Build a quarterly review surface: 'Show me PTO utilization by employee over the past 90 days, and flag anyone who has more than 5 days of unused PTO accrued.' This matters for your small team — unused PTO is a liability on your books, and property management operators often miss it until year-end.

11 As you refine the system, publish your final PTO policy document, blackout calendar, and role-specific coverage checklists to the Knowledge Management knowledge base so every new hire onboards with the same information from day one.

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

June 2026 PTO Gap — Peak Leasing Season

Sample numbers from a real run

Leasing Agent (Sarah) — PTO June 9–13	5
Open showings during that week	14
Move-ins scheduled June 10–12	3
Coverage tasks completed before June 8	5
Coverage tasks completed on time (before departure)	5

Sarah, your senior leasing agent, submits PTO for June 9–13 — smack in the middle of your busiest leasing week of the year. In the old world, you'd find out about the 14 open showings and 3 move-ins when you checked AppFolio on June 9 and saw nothing confirmed. With Starch, the moment Paylocity shows her PTO approved, a P2 task fires in Task Manager: 'Sarah PTO Coverage — June 9–13.' The attached checklist (pulled from Knowledge Management) has five items: reassign 14 showings to Marcus or schedule them for the week prior, confirm move-in inspection times with the maintenance coordinator, update the owner portal so the three affected owners know Marcus is their contact, set Sarah's email auto-reply with Marcus's number, and update the on-call rotation in the knowledge base. Starch also flags you in Slack because June 9–13 falls in the blackout alert window you set. All five tasks are completed by June 7. The week runs fine. You find out because the task tracker shows 5/5 closed — not because something broke.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO coverage task completion rate before employee departure date (target: 100%)

Coverage gap incidents per quarter — showings missed or work orders unacknowledged due to unplanned absence

Time-off balance accuracy: variance between Paylocity accrued balance and days taken as tracked in Starch

Blackout period PTO requests flagged and resolved before approval (month-end close, peak leasing weeks)

Average time from PTO approval to coverage checklist completion (target: under 24 hours)

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity or ADP time-off module alone

Tracks balances and approvals fine, but has no visibility into your operational calendar — it doesn't know that June 9–13 is your busiest leasing week, and it won't trigger a coverage checklist when someone submits time off.

Google Sheets PTO tracker

Free and familiar, but someone has to update it — and in a small property management shop, that someone is usually you, two days late, when you're already dealing with a maintenance emergency.

BambooHR or Rippling

Purpose-built HR platforms with solid time-off workflows, but they don't connect to your operational data (AppFolio work orders, Google Calendar showings, Plaid balances) — so coverage gaps still get discovered after the fact.

Notion or Confluence HR wiki

Good for storing the PTO policy document, but static — it won't trigger a task when someone submits PTO or alert you when a request conflicts with month-end close week.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — task manager, knowledge management 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 AppFolio as our PMS. Can Starch pull data from it?

Starch automates AppFolio through your browser — no API needed. If you want Starch to cross-reference open work orders or scheduled move-ins against your PTO calendar, it can log into AppFolio the same way you do and pull that data. It's not a scheduled sync like Paylocity, but for a weekly coverage-check workflow it works cleanly.

We use ADP instead of Paylocity. Does this still work?

Yes. Starch connects directly to ADP via scheduled sync and pulls workers, org units, and pay statements on a schedule. The PTO tracking setup described here works identically with ADP as the source.

Task Manager is listed as in development. Can I still use this workflow?

Task Manager is currently in beta — request access and Starch will get you set up. In the meantime, you can describe your coverage checklist workflow and Starch can build a lightweight custom app that handles the same logic. You'd tell Starch: 'Build me a coverage checklist app that creates a task with these five steps whenever Paylocity shows a new approved PTO request.' That custom app is fully available today.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? We handle sensitive employee data.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your firm has a compliance requirement that mandates SOC 2 for any system touching employee records, you should factor that in. It's on the roadmap, but we won't claim it before it's done.

How does Starch handle historical PTO data? Can I see what was taken last year?

Starch syncs your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule and stores it in Starch's database, so you'll build a running history from the moment you connect. It's not a long-horizon data warehouse — if you need multi-year archived records, your Paylocity or ADP system of record is still the authoritative source for anything before you connected. For the day-to-day and month-to-month visibility most property management operators need, the scheduled sync handles it well.

My team doesn't formally request PTO — they just text me. Can Starch handle that?

Starch connects directly to Gmail and Outlook via scheduled sync and can monitor for PTO-related messages. You can build an automation that says: 'When an email or Slack message from a team member mentions PTO, vacation, or out of office, create a draft coverage task for me to review and confirm.' It's not a formal HR workflow, but it gets you off the mental tracking treadmill and into a system — even if the inputs are informal.