Time off that doesn’t need a second list
The day was approved in an email. The balance was counted in a sheet. Somewhere around week three the two stopped agreeing, and nobody noticed until payroll.
On every plan, including the free 30-day trial · Approve or decline — either outcome is recorded.The second list is where the truth goes to die.
Anyone still approving leave over email and tracking balances in a separate sheet is keeping two records of the same day, and only one of them is ever updated twice.
No sender kept, no date kept, nothing counted anywhere.
Same person, same week. Last edited by somebody, at some point.
A month later this surfaces as a no-show against someone who did nothing wrong, and the only way to settle it is to find the email.
A decision has two recorded outcomes, not one happy path.
An employee requests, a manager approves or declines, and the outcome is recorded against the person and the date. Both ends of that sentence are the product working.
A request is submitted by the employee, a manager decides, and the decision splits into two recorded tracks: an approval is counted against the balance and marks the attendance row, and a decline is recorded against the person and the date.
What is waiting on you, without opening an inbox.
Requests live beside attendance rather than in a mail folder, so the thing a manager has to act on is a row on a screen they already have open.
Leave and attendance approvals land in one count, because both are things somebody is waiting on — which is why the second tile breaks itself down into 3 leave · 2 attendance rather than leaving you to guess.
Waiting on a decision — and either one gets written down.
- Leave requests, balances and the holiday calendar sit beside attendance, not in a separate tool.
- Deciding here is the act that updates the record, instead of starting a second one somebody has to reconcile later.
- An approved day marks the attendance record itself, so nobody retypes it into a second list.
You can check what you have left yourself.
You should not have to message HR to find out whether you have a day left to take. Your remaining leave is yours to look at, which happens to remove the single most common question HR answers.
Remaining leave
EXAMPLESelf-service for the daily things — checking in, requesting leave, seeing holidays — is part of how roles work, not a separate product. See roles and permissions →
Set once, and the whole team’s attendance already knows.
Set the holidays your company observes once, and they apply across attendance for everyone — no reminder on the morning, no six people asking whether the office is open.
It is the other thing that writes into attendance without anyone retyping it, alongside an approved day.
What sits next to it
Leave is one page of the same workspace. These are the others, in the order the product menu groups them.
TRACK THE TIME
SEE HOW IT WAS SPENT
Leave, answered
The questions that decide whether this replaces the email thread.
What happens when a leave request is declined?
The same thing that happens when it is approved: the outcome is recorded against the person and the date. A decline is a record, not a dead end — there is no state where a request simply stops existing and nobody can say what was decided.
Does an approved day update attendance automatically, or do we mark it twice?
Once. Approved leave marks the attendance record, so an approved absence never surfaces later as a no-show, and nobody retypes the same day into a second list.
Can employees see their own remaining leave without asking HR?
Yes, and that is the point. Employees see their own remaining balance themselves, which removes the most common question HR answers.
Who decides which public holidays apply?
You do. You set the holidays your company observes once, and they apply across attendance for everyone. Shiftena does not decide which days your company closes.
Is leave included on every plan?
Yes, in full, including the free 30-day trial. Attendance, leave and the holiday calendar are baseline features. Plans differ on team size, storage and the extras built on top, never on whether your team can request a day off.
Does Shiftena set our leave policy or our allowances?
No. Shiftena records the requests, the decisions, the balances and the holidays you set. It does not write your policy, and it does not decide how much leave anyone gets — those stay your company's decisions.
The next request gets a decision, written down once.
Approve or decline — either way the outcome sits against the person and the date, the balance reflects it, and the attendance record does not need a second list to agree with.