Free Employee Vacation Request Form

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Organizations reward employees by providing great pay, benefits, and paid time off.  

Keeping track of these benefits is one of the responsibilities of an HR Assistant and is imperative to good record keeping.

Many organizations now use electronic time and attendance solutions for managing human resource documents, but for those who haven’t made that leap yet, there are manual ways of keeping employee records.

Keeping track of employee vacation and sick hours can be a laborious task. Having a good tracking system can help with this.

Policies and procedures should include a requirement for employees to request to take time off.

Giving the organization sufficient notice of paid time off can help prepare the organization to find adequate coverage for the person who will be away on vacation.

Providing a paid time off benefit also helps to reduce employee absenteeism, increase employee engagement, and reduce the risk of employee burnout.

Your policy should include what types of days employees will be paid for – sick, holiday, vacation, personal day, etc. as well as the number of days or hours that the benefit includes.  

For example, an employee may earn the following:

Vacation – 80 hours
Sick Time – 40 hours
Holidays – 48 hours
Personal Day – 8 hours
Totaling – 176 hours to use over a twelve-month period of time.

Organizations that use a paid time off benefit system, as opposed to designated time allotments, allow employees to decide how and when to use their PTO.

For example, an employee who does not call in sick can potentially have an extra 40 hours of discretionary time in the above example.  

The advantage this gives the organization is that it minimizes last-minute scrambling that often happens when someone calls in sick.

This type of policy allows the employee more control over when and how to use their paid time benefit.

Example Vacation Request Form

 To keep track of hours used, create an Excel spreadsheet that calculates as hours are added or subtracted from the bank.

Keep one tab for each employee and keep a new file for each calendar year. For example:

Setting up a system is key to tracking employee PTO usage.

These examples can be used in a Word document and an Excel spreadsheet document. For an editable copy of this document, click here.