With Time Off, you can track vacation time, paid time off (PTO), sick time, and any other leave category, all inside Harvest. Administrators set up your company's time-off types and allowances, team members request time off, and balances update automatically as requests are submitted, approved, or rejected.

Get started

If you're an administrator, the first time you open Time off in the main navigation you'll get a short setup wizard with four steps:

• Overview. An introduction ("Introducing Time Off"). Nothing is configured here — click Get started to continue.
• Holiday calendars. Choose the countries whose public holidays your team observes ("Which holiday calendars do you use?"). Harvest creates an editable calendar for each one, or you can start with an empty calendar.
• Assign people. Assign each teammate to the holiday calendar they follow ("Assign people to calendars"). You have to assign yourself to finish this step.
• Vacation policy. Create your first time-off type ("Set up your Vacation policy") — its balance type, accrual schedule, allowance, max carryover and approval — then click Finish setup.

Non-administrators see an introduction with a Contact an admin button instead. The leave year isn't part of the wizard; it's set later (see Leave year below). After setup, you can add more types and customize individual allowances any time under Time off › Configure.

Set up your time-off types

Create a separate type for each category of leave your team uses, like vacation time, sick days, or personal leave. Each type has its own color and icon, plus its own policy. Under Time off › Configure › Time off types you can set:

• Balance type — Available upfront (ready to use immediately), Accrued (added gradually on a schedule), or Unlimited (no balance tracked). An accrued type also has an Accrual schedule: Monthly, Every 2 weeks (biweekly), Twice a month (semimonthly), or Per hour worked (for hourly or sick-leave policies).
• Default allowance in days per year.
• Deferred accrual — Make earned allowance available next leave year. When on, days earned this year only become usable on the first day of the next leave year. This is required by law in some countries (for example Belgium, France and Sweden).
• Max carryover (days) or Max carryover (hours) — how much unused leave rolls into the next year. Per-hour-worked types carry over too, so hourly or sick-leave balances aren't lost at year end. A negative balance always carries over in full.
• Increases with service — tenure steps, so an allowance can grow with years of service. Click + Add step; each step reads "After [N] years, the allowance becomes [X] days/year". Years of service are counted from each person's employment start date.
• Whether requests need administrator approval, and whether the type is visible to all team members.

Team members can only request types that are marked visible. You can add, edit, deactivate, or restore types under Time off › Configure.

Leave year

The leave year is when allowances reset and when accrual starts counting. Set it under Time off › Configure › Leave year. Leave year starts can be the Calendar year — 1 January or the Hire anniversary (each person's period follows their own employment start date), or you can enter a custom Start date. A Period preview shows the current range.

Changing the leave-year start mid-year doesn't create a short transition period or prorate anything — balances are always calculated from the current settings, so past and future years recalculate at once and days already taken move into whichever year they now fall in. The requests themselves stay.

Request time off

Any team member can request time off from My time off:

1. Click Request time off and choose a time-off type.
2. Choose full days or a partial day, and pick the dates.
3. Preview the impact on your balance before you submit.
4. Add an optional note, then submit the request.

Nonworking days and holidays are skipped automatically, so they won't use your balance. If the dates you pick overlap time off you already have booked, you can keep the existing request and book around it, or replace it with the new dates.

My time off also shows each type's allowance, used, pending, and remaining balance, along with a summary of your whole year.

Review and approve requests

If a time-off type requires approval, new requests appear under Approvals. Administrators can review each request, see the before-and-after balance impact, and approve it, request changes, or reject it. Approvals also flag coverage conflicts, so you can see when teammates who share projects are away on the same day.

Team calendar

Under Team overview, administrators can see everyone's time off, approved and pending, in a single calendar. You can filter it by department, role, project, client, or teammate. The Manage allowance tab reviews each person's annual allowance, work schedule, and any custom overrides to your company defaults. A custom allowance replaces the type's default or its "Increases with service" steps for that person; choosing Company default puts them back on the steps.

Sync time off to Google Calendar

You can send your approved time off from Harvest to your Google Calendar, so teammates can see when you're away without opening Harvest. Each person turns this on for themselves under Time off › Configure › Calendar sync, then Connect. This works with Google Workspace accounts (not personal Gmail).

Things to know:

• Only approved requests sync — not pending ones. Each day becomes an out-of-office event called Time off that doesn't decline meetings.
• Only today onwards is added, and public holidays aren't synced.
• Sync is one-way (Harvest to Google Calendar).
• Cancelling a request removes its upcoming events but keeps past days; turning sync off or disconnecting also removes upcoming events.
• Outlook isn't supported for time-off sync — the Outlook connection only reads calendars for timesheets.

Time Off on your timesheet

Once a request is approved, the time off appears directly on your timesheet as informational entries. They're accounted for, so you don't need to track time against them, and they don't add to your tracked hours. You can still track regular time on the same day if you work part of it.