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Time Off Management

This guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough of the Time Off feature in Toggl Track, a streamlined tool for managing vacations, sick leave, and team absences. It covers everything from initial activation and policy creation to the nuances of prorated accruals and the approval workflow.

Time Off is the simplest way to track vacations, sick days, and any type of leave — all from inside Toggl Track.

It can ONLY be manually activated in your instance by the Toggl teams. If you want to use it, feel free to book a demo here, request activation directly or send an email to corentin.racine@toggl.com.

Whether you’re setting it up for your team or requesting your own days off, here’s a complete walkthrough of how it works.

1. Getting started: where everything lives

Open the sidebar and click Time Off.

You’ll land on a page with three tabs, each with a different purpose:

  • Team Requests — where approvers review and manage requests
  • Your Time Off — your personal balances, history, and requests
  • Team Policies — where admins create and manage all leave types

If you’re an admin, you’ll have access to all three.

2. Start by creating your first policy

Policies define how your team takes time off — for example, “Vacation”, “Sick Leave”, or “Parental Leave.”

To create one:

  1. Go to Team Policies
  2. Click New Policy
  3. Give it a name and an emoji (:palm_tree: for Vacation? Why not.)
  4. Add a short description
  5. Set the allowance per year (e.g., 25 days)
  6. Choose the reset date
  7. (Optional) Enable Prorated accruals

A quick note on prorating:

If you create a policy mid-year, prorating gives members only the remaining portion of days for the current year.

For example, create a 25-day policy in mid-November → you receive only the proportional amount for what’s left of 2025.

When you’re done, click Create. You can edit policies at any time.

 

3. Decide whether your team needs approvals

At the bottom of the “Team Policies” tab, you’ll see one key setting called “Require approval for time off”:

  • Turned OFF → Team members can set their own time off, no approval flow
  • Turned ON → Requests must be approved or rejected by an approver or admin

You can switch this anytime.

 

4. Understanding your balances

Go to Your Time Off, and you’ll see:

  • Your current available balance
  • Any planned future leave
  • A history of all accruals, changes, and deductions
  • Your submission history (requests and their status)

A detail that surprises many users:

Time Off only deducts days after you return from your leave.

This gives you room to edit or cancel before it’s final.

 

Your time off

 

5. How to submit time off

You can submit time off from:

  • The main Time Off page, or
  • The “New Time Off” button in the top-right corner

 

Add time off

 

Here’s the flow:

  1. Choose the policy (e.g., Vacation)
  2. Select your start & end dates
  3. Toggl automatically counts week-days only
  • Saturday & Sunday = 0 days by default
  1. Adjust the number of days if needed:
  • 1 day = 8 working hours
  • 0.5 day = 4 hours
  • Custom values allowed (0.2, 0.3, 0.375…)
  1. Add an optional note (e.g., “Traveling to the mountains :mountain_railway:”)
  2. Submit

If approvals are off, the leave is automatically accepted.

If approvals are on, the leave becomes Pending approval.

You’ll now see:

  • Available days (unchanged until the leave is completed), and
  • Planned days (future leave already scheduled)

6. What happens behind the scenes: planned vs available

After submitting, your balance works like this:

  • Available = what you can still take today
  • Planned = what you’ve scheduled in the future
  • Once the leave ends → the system deducts it automatically and updates your available balance

This makes the system flexible — you can still modify or cancel before the leave happens.

7. Approvals: reviewing, approving, or rejecting

If approvals are enabled, approvers/admins will see a new tab: Team Requests.

Here they can:

  • See all incoming requests
  • Open each request to review details
  • Approve or reject
  • Add comments

If a request exceeds the member’s balance, Toggl shows a warning — but allows the approver to approve anyway (negative balance).

This is useful if someone negotiated extra days or carried over time.

Rejected requests always show:

  • The rejection reason
  • The full audit trail
  • A clear status for both the approver and requester

8. Viewing time off across the whole team

Admins and approvers can use the Team Time Off calendar.

From there you can:

  • See who’s off and when
  • Switch between list view and calendar view
  • Check submission dates
  • Track overlapping leave

This gives a quick overview for planning, staffing, or simply avoiding surprise absences.

 

 

9. Editing or cancelling requests

Members can amend or cancel planned time off at any time.

Everything updates automatically across the balances, history, and team calendar.

10. What’s coming next

This walkthrough covers the current version of Time Off.

More customization and accrual flexibility are already on the way — including more granular accrual types and advanced policy settings.