People & HR

How to track pto and time off as Small HR Teams

People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your PTO tracking lives in three places simultaneously: Paylocity or ADP has the official balances, a shared Google Sheet someone built two years ago has the 'real' view managers actually use, and Slack has a #time-off channel where people post 'OOO Friday' with no formal request attached. When a manager asks 'who's out next week across the engineering team?' you're manually cross-referencing all three. When the CFO asks for Q3 leave liability for the audit, you're exporting from payroll and building a pivot table. With 150 employees and two of you, that reconciliation work alone costs a full day a month — and it's not even your job, it's just the gap between tools that don't talk.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

People & HRFor Small HR Teams2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live PTO dashboard that pulls directly from your Paylocity or ADP data on a schedule, so balances, pending requests, and upcoming absences are always current — no manual exports, no stale spreadsheet

An automated weekly digest that flags coverage gaps (e.g., more than 20% of a team out in the same week) and posts the summary to Slack before Monday morning standup

A leave-liability report you can generate on demand for finance — pulling accrued PTO balances by department, formatted the way your CFO actually wants it, not the way Paylocity exports it

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

Knowledge Management Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Paylocity data on a schedule — employees, payroll runs, benefits, and time-off records flow into Starch automatically. For teams on ADP, Starch connects directly to ADP and syncs workers, org units, and pay statements on the same cadence. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog so the agent queries it live when posting weekly digests. Google Sheets or Notion can be wired in from the integration catalog for any teams that still maintain a manual tracker alongside payroll.

Prompts to copy

Build me a PTO tracker dashboard that pulls from Paylocity — show current balances, pending requests, and approved time off by department for the next 60 days. Flag any week where more than two people from the same team are out simultaneously.

Every Monday at 7am, pull next week's approved time off from Paylocity, check if any team has more than 20% of headcount out, and post a coverage summary to #people-ops in Slack.

Build me a leave liability report that calculates accrued PTO balances by department using Paylocity data, shows the dollar value at each employee's current pay rate, and exports to a table I can paste into the board deck.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Paylocity (or ADP) as a scheduled-sync provider — Starch will pull employees, time-off records, and pay statements automatically on a recurring schedule, so you're never working from a stale export.

2 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can post coverage alerts and weekly digests to your #people-ops or #hr channel without you manually compiling them.

3 Tell Starch to build a PTO dashboard: describe the columns you actually want — employee name, department, manager, current balance, days used YTD, pending requests, and approved future absences — rather than accepting the default Paylocity view.

4 Add a coverage-gap rule: instruct Starch to flag any calendar week where two or more employees from the same team are approved as out, so you catch conflicts before managers complain.

5 Set up a Monday 7am automation that pulls the coming week's approved absences, runs the coverage check, and posts a plain-English summary to Slack — one message, every week, no manual work.

6 Build a leave-liability report surface: tell Starch to multiply each employee's accrued balance by their hourly rate from payroll and group the output by department, so finance has a number they can use for audit prep.

7 Add a 'use-it-or-lose-it' alert automation for any employees whose PTO balance exceeds your policy cap as of November 1 — have Starch generate a list and draft individual Slack messages to each manager.

8 For any employees tracked in BambooHR or Rippling (connected from Starch's integration catalog), wire those sources in so the dashboard consolidates across HRIS systems if you're mid-migration or running a hybrid setup.

9 Pin the PTO dashboard link in your #hr Slack channel and in the Knowledge Management app so managers can self-serve 'who's out this week' without pinging you directly.

10 Schedule a quarterly leave-liability export to auto-generate and drop into a Notion page (Starch connects directly to Notion) so the CFO always has a fresh number before board prep starts.

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

Q3 2026 Audit Prep — Leave Liability for Finance

Sample numbers from a real run

Engineering (22 employees) — accrued PTO liability	47,300
Sales (18 employees) — accrued PTO liability	31,200
Operations (14 employees) — accrued PTO liability	22,800
G&A including HR (8 employees) — accrued PTO liability	16,400
Total leave liability flagged for audit	117,700

It's July 28 and your CFO messages you at 4pm: 'Auditors want the leave liability schedule by end of week — accrued balances, dollar value, by department.' In the old world, you export from Paylocity, open the spreadsheet, VLOOKUP against the salary table from the offer-letter tracker, sum by department, and spend two hours double-checking the math. With Starch, you type: 'Generate a leave liability report using Paylocity data — accrued PTO balances by employee, multiply by hourly rate from payroll, group by department, total per department and grand total.' Starch pulls 150 employee records from the Paylocity scheduled sync, calculates the liability, and returns a table showing Engineering at $47,300, Sales at $31,200, Operations at $22,800, and G&A at $16,400 — $117,700 total. You paste it into the board template. The whole thing takes eight minutes. The CFO responds 'perfect' and you never open Excel.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

PTO utilization rate by department — % of accrued days actually taken, tracked quarterly to catch teams that are underwater and burning out

Coverage gap incidents per quarter — weeks where 20%+ of a team was simultaneously out, used to report to department heads and tighten approval workflows

Leave liability as % of payroll — accrued PTO dollar value divided by quarterly payroll run, tracked for audit readiness and flagged when it crosses the threshold your CFO set

Time to resolve PTO balance disputes — days from employee question to confirmed resolution, a proxy for how clean your HRIS data actually is

Manager self-service rate — % of 'who's out?' questions answered without HR involvement, measured by tracking direct dashboard link clicks vs. #people-ops pings

Comparison

What this replaces

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

Paylocity native reporting

Paylocity's built-in reports show you what Paylocity knows, formatted Paylocity's way — you can't cross-reference Slack PTO posts, add a coverage-gap rule, or reshape the output for the CFO without exporting to Excel first.

BambooHR + manual Google Sheet

BambooHR handles requests and balances well for its own data, but the Google Sheet that lives alongside it immediately goes stale and someone on your team is always the one keeping it current.

Rippling PTO module

Rippling's all-in-one model works cleanly inside Rippling, but if you're running payroll on ADP and HRIS on Rippling you're back to two sources of truth and no automated reconciliation between them.

Lattice or 15Five (people platforms)

These tools are built for performance and engagement, not leave management — you end up with a third system for PTO that doesn't connect to your payroll data for liability calculations.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — 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

We run payroll on ADP but our HRIS is BambooHR — can Starch pull from both?

Yes. Starch syncs your ADP data on a schedule (workers, org units, pay statements) and connects to BambooHR from its integration catalog, querying it live when your dashboard runs. You can build a single PTO view that consolidates both sources, which is exactly the reconciliation problem most 150-person companies have when they're running two systems.

Will Starch replace Paylocity's time-off approval workflow?

No, and it shouldn't. Paylocity handles the request-and-approve flow; Starch reads the output of that flow and builds the reporting, alerting, and cross-team visibility layer on top of it. Your employees still request time off the same way. Starch just makes the resulting data actually useful to HR without manual exports.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified?

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your company's security policy requires SOC 2 Type II for any tool that touches payroll or HR data, that's worth knowing upfront.

What if some of our PTO requests come through Slack and never make it into Paylocity?

That's the gap Starch can help surface, not automatically fix. You can build an automation that monitors a designated Slack channel for time-off messages and flags ones that don't appear in Paylocity within 48 hours — essentially a 'did this ever get logged?' check. The reconciliation prompt would look like: 'Every Friday, compare mentions of PTO in #time-off on Slack this week against approved requests in Paylocity — list any that appear in Slack but not in Paylocity.' It doesn't auto-create records, but it gives you the audit list.

Can I set this up so managers can see their own team's PTO without asking HR?

Yes. You can build a department-filtered view of the PTO dashboard and share the link with each manager — they see their team's upcoming absences and balances without having Paylocity admin access or pinging you. The Knowledge Management app is a good place to pin these links alongside your leave policy documentation so managers have one place to go.

Our data in Paylocity has errors — employees with wrong accrual rates, stale termination dates. Will Starch surface those?

Starch will reflect what Paylocity contains, including the errors. But you can tell Starch to flag anomalies — employees with negative balances, accrual rates outside your policy range, or termination dates more than 30 days in the past who still show as active — and it'll generate an exceptions list you can use to audit the underlying data. That's a materially better signal than waiting for an employee to complain.