Timetastic
Simple staff leave and absence tracker for small and mid-sized teams.
What is Timetastic?
Timetastic is a cloud-based staff leave planner that lets employees request time off and managers approve it, replacing spreadsheets and paper forms. It tracks holiday allowances, sickness and other absence types, with a shared calendar and mobile apps for visibility across the team.
Best known for: Simple staff holiday and absence tracking
Key features
- Online leave requests and approvals
- Automatic holiday allowance tracking
- Shared team wall chart and calendar
- Absence and sickness reporting
- Calendar, Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations
- Mobile and desktop apps
Who Timetastic is best for
- Small businesses tracking staff holidays
- Teams replacing spreadsheets for PTO
- UK and remote-friendly SMBs
Ideal team: Best for small to mid-sized teams of roughly 5-200 who want straightforward leave and absence tracking.
Timetastic pricing
Timetastic
$1.50/per user / mo
- Unlimited users and departments
- Holiday allowance tracking and approvals
- Shared wall chart calendar
- Mobile and desktop apps
Timetastic Pro
$2.50/per user / mo
- Absence trends and burnout alerts
- Company-wide reports and enhanced profiles
- Slack, Teams and calendar integrations
- SSO, accrued leave and capped leave types
Costs to watch before you commit
- Prices are set in GBP (approx £1.20 and £2.00 per user/mo); USD amount varies with exchange rate
- Billed per user, so cost scales directly with headcount even for infrequent leave takers
- Pro-only features like SSO, integrations and accrued leave require the higher tier
Timetastic pros and cons
Pros
- Does one job and does it properly: booking, approving, and tracking staff leave, with none of the bloat of a full HR suite
- Genuinely cheap at roughly £1.20–£2.00 per user per month, which is easy to justify against the spreadsheet it replaces
- Setup is measured in minutes: add people, set allowances, done, no implementation project or consultant
- The shared wall chart makes clashes obvious before they happen, which is the actual problem most teams have
- Slack, Teams, and calendar integrations on Pro mean leave shows up where people already work rather than in a portal nobody opens
- Burnout alerts on Pro flag staff who aren't taking their leave, which is a genuinely useful management signal rather than a gimmick
Cons
- Leave tracking only: no payroll, no performance reviews, no onboarding, so it's one tool among several rather than an HR system
- Priced per user, so cost scales with total headcount even though most staff book leave a handful of times a year
- GBP pricing means US and other non-UK buyers carry exchange-rate variance on every invoice
- SSO, integrations, and accrued leave are all Pro-only, so the features a mid-sized team actually needs sit on the higher tier
- Reporting is adequate rather than deep; teams wanting rich workforce analytics will find it thin
- Its UK origins show in defaults and terminology, which occasionally reads oddly for US buyers
Timetastic review: a closer look
What Timetastic is
Timetastic is a staff leave tracker, and deliberately nothing more. It replaces the shared spreadsheet, the wall calendar, and the email chain where someone asks their manager whether they can take the Friday off. Staff request leave, managers approve it, everyone's allowance updates automatically, and the whole team can see who's off when. That narrowness is the product's argument: full HR platforms handle leave as one module among twenty, and do it while charging considerably more and demanding real implementation effort. If leave is the only part of HR that's genuinely broken for you, buying an entire HR suite to fix it is poor value.
The wall chart is the feature that matters
The shared calendar view sounds mundane and is the thing users consistently single out. Most leave problems aren't about the request-and-approve mechanics; they're about two people from the same small team being off in the same week and nobody noticing until it's too late to fix. Making the whole team's leave visible at a glance solves that before it becomes a staffing hole. It also quietly reduces the manager's admin load, because staff self-select around visible clashes instead of asking. For a business of five to fifty people, that visibility is most of the value.
Standard versus Pro, and what you'll actually pay
Two tiers: Timetastic at roughly £1.20/user/mo and Timetastic Pro at roughly £2.00. Standard covers unlimited users and departments, allowance tracking, approvals, the wall chart, and the mobile and desktop apps, a complete product for a small team. Pro adds the things a growing company tends to need: SSO, Slack and Teams integrations, accrued and capped leave types, company-wide reports, and absence-trend and burnout alerts. Two budgeting notes. Pricing is set in GBP, so US buyers see a figure that moves with the exchange rate. And billing is per user across your whole headcount, not per active leave-booker, which is still cheap, but means a 200-person company pays for 200 seats to serve a function each person touches a few times a year.
Burnout alerts and the management angle
The Pro-tier absence trends deserve a mention because they invert the usual purpose of leave software. Most systems exist to stop people taking too much time off; Timetastic's alerts flag the opposite: staff who aren't booking their entitlement, which is a reliable early indicator of overload and of a liability quietly accruing on your books. For a small business without an HR function, having software surface that unprompted is more useful than another report nobody runs. It's a modest feature, well aimed.
How it compares
Against full HR platforms like BambooHR or Personio, this isn't a competitor so much as a different purchase: those manage the whole employee lifecycle and price accordingly, and if you need onboarding, performance, and documents in one system, buy one of those and accept its leave module. Against spreadsheets, the real incumbent, Timetastic wins comprehensively for a couple of pounds per person. Against other dedicated leave trackers such as Leave Dates or Absence.io, the differences are narrow and come down to interface preference and integration fit; Timetastic's wall chart and burnout alerts are its distinguishing touches. The decision is almost always suite-versus-point-tool rather than Timetastic-versus-a-rival.
Who should use Timetastic?
A good fit
Timetastic fits small and mid-sized teams of roughly 5 to 200 people who have outgrown a spreadsheet for staff holidays but don't want or need a full HR platform. It's especially good for distributed and remote-friendly teams, where a visible shared calendar does more work than it would in an office where absences are obvious, and for UK businesses who'll be billed in their own currency. If leave is the specific thing that's messy and the rest of your HR admin is fine, this is the proportionate answer.
Look elsewhere if…
Companies that need payroll, onboarding, performance reviews, or document management should buy an HR platform and use its leave module rather than adding another subscription. Larger organizations with complex, multi-jurisdiction leave policies and deep reporting requirements will find this too simple. US-based buyers who dislike currency variance on a recurring invoice should factor that in, and anyone whose must-haves are SSO and integrations should price Pro from the start rather than Standard.
The verdict
Timetastic is a well-made point solution that knows exactly what it is. For a couple of pounds per person per month it removes a genuinely annoying piece of small-business admin, sets up in an afternoon, and gives everyone a shared view of who's off, which is the part that actually prevents problems. The burnout alerts on Pro are a thoughtful addition that most competitors don't bother with. The limits are entirely predictable from the positioning: it's leave and nothing else, per-user pricing means you pay for your whole headcount, the useful integrations sit behind Pro, and GBP billing adds a wrinkle for US buyers. If you want one thing fixed properly rather than everything covered adequately, it's an easy yes.
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