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.

Import time off from another tool

If you're moving to Harvest from another time-off tool, you can import past time off from a CSV file so balances start out right. This is rolling out gradually.

1. Open Harvest AI, attach your CSV and ask it to import your time off.
2. Resolve issues. Harvest matches each row to a teammate and a time-off type. Rows it can't match are listed with the reason, for example More than one teammate matches "Name". Pick the right teammate, fix the row in your file, or skip it.
3. Review import. Check What will be imported (per teammate, broken down by time-off type) and What will be skipped, then confirm.

Things to know:

• Imported time off counts as approved, so balances, the Team calendar and reports update straight away.
• Rows that are already in Harvest aren't imported again.
• Click Download updated CSV to save your file with every fix you made.
• Importing currently needs Harvest AI to be turned on for your account.
• Imported days in the past aren't added to Google Calendar. Calendar sync only adds today onwards.
• To undo an import, an administrator can cancel the imported requests.

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, and anyone an administrator has given an approve permission, can review each request, see the before-and-after balance impact, and approve it, request changes, or reject it. They also get notified about new requests from the people they can approve. Approvals also flag coverage conflicts, so you can see when teammates who share projects are away on the same day.

Let other people view or approve time off

Administrators can give these permissions to anyone under Team › [person] › Permissions › Time off:

• View time off requests for people they manage or View all time off requests across the account opens the Team calendar, showing only the people they're allowed to see.
• Approve time off requests for people they manage or Approve all time off requests across the account opens Approvals, on the web and in the mobile app.

"People they manage" means the people listed under that person's Assigned people. Only someone with a manager-level role can have assigned people, so this option does nothing for a Member. Setting up time-off types, the leave year and allowances stays with administrators.

See time off balances in Reports

Go to Reports › Time off to see allowance, used, booked, pending and remaining time off, broken down by person and leave type.

• The report opens on the current leave year. You can switch to a month or a custom date range. If your leave year follows each person's hire anniversary, their dates can differ from the range shown.
• Each person starts collapsed and shows their total across all leave types. Click a name to see each type, or use Expand all.
• Click any column header to sort by it, and click again to reverse. For example, sort by Remaining to see who has the least time off left. Unlimited balances sort above any number of days.
• Filter by department, role or teammate.
• Use Save report to keep the view. Saved reports can be added to a dashboard as a block.
• Export to CSV or Excel. The file lists one row per person per leave type and doesn't include a per-person total, so add up a person's rows to match the total on screen. Values in the file aren't rounded (for example 0.7019 instead of 0.7).

Members only see their own time off in this report. The report is available once Time Off is turned on and set up for your account.

Time off days, hours and requests are also available as metrics in custom reports and dashboard charts.

Cancel a time-off request

You can cancel a pending request, or an approved request that hasn't fully passed yet, from My time off. Your balance updates straight away.

Once approved time off has ended, only administrators can cancel it. Go to Time off › Approvals › Approved (or My time off for your own requests) and click Cancel request. Harvest shows a warning: "This time off has already occurred. Cancelling it will recalculate your balances and update related timesheets and reports." Nothing changes until you confirm.

Things to know:

• Team members can't cancel their own past approved time off. They'll need to ask an administrator.
• Time off inside a locked timesheet period can't be cancelled.
• The team member isn't notified when an administrator cancels their past time off. The request history shows who cancelled it.
• Administrators can also cancel past approved time off through the API, for example to undo a bad import one request at a time.

Team calendar

Under Team overview, administrators, and anyone with a view permission, can see 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 your calendar

You can send your approved time off from Harvest to your Google Calendar or Outlook 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. Google Calendar sync works with Google Workspace accounts (not personal Gmail). Outlook sync is rolling out gradually.

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 your calendar).
• Cancelling a request removes its upcoming events but keeps past days. Turning sync off or disconnecting also removes upcoming events.
• If your Outlook connection expires, go to your Security page and click Reconnect.

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.