How do I track time off (PTO), vacation, or sick days?
While Harvest doesn't have a built-in feature for tracking leave, there are a few different workarounds you can use to track vacation time, paid time off (PTO), or sick time:
- Create an internal, non-billable project for your company, and create separate tasks for each category—vacation time, time off, sick days, etc.
- Create tasks for each category—vacation time, etc.—and add them to each of your existing projects for current clients. With either option, users will then track time to those specific tasks.
- If people on your team have different amounts of time off available and you'd like to be able to track their usage, some teams find it useful to create an internal, non-billable time off project for each person. If you do that, you could create Vacation as a task, for example, give the project an hours per task budget (if your plan has support for setting budgets), and then assign that task the respective number of vacation hours on each person's time off project.
If all of the time is captured within a single internal project, you can use its project analysis page to take a look at your data. If you have separate tasks for each of your projects or different projects for each person, you can use a detailed time report to drill down and view exactly the teammate, task, and project you want to see.
Note that Harvest doesn't automatically manage accrual or leave balances, though.
Adding time off in bulk
If your company has planned days off for the entire company that you'd like to add in bulk to your team's timesheets, and your plan supports importing data, Administrators can use a time import to bulk add entries for multiple people.
You can see more details, as well as a helpful video, in our article on importing and exporting data.