Time-Off Request Form Template

Most small teams approve time off in chat, and it works right up until it doesn't: two people book the same week, a sick day never reaches payroll, and nobody can reconstruct who agreed to what. A time-off request form is the lightest fix there is. It keeps the thirty-second ask thirty seconds long while leaving a record that managers, payroll, and the requester all read the same way.

The load-bearing fields. Name and team identify the requester without a login. The type selector matters more than it looks, since vacation, sick, personal, bereavement, and jury duty are tracked differently in most payroll systems, and some carry legal protections, so sorting them at the source saves reconciliation later. The two date fields pin the range down, where a single free-text "dates" box produces answers like "around Easter week", the ambiguity a form exists to kill. The coverage question is the operational heart of the template: a manager's real hesitation is rarely the days, it is who handles the standup, the on-call, the till. Once the request names its own cover, approval turns into a formality. A conditional rule keeps the doctor's-note question hidden until someone picks a sick day, so vacation requesters never meet it.

Left out to stay fast. Remaining-balance math and multi-step approval chains stay out. Balances live in payroll and go stale the moment they are copied, and approval chains belong in the conversation that follows, not in the ask itself. Keeping the form under a minute is what makes people use it at all instead of falling back to a hallway mention.

Who reaches for it. Teams of five to fifty without HR software, franchise and retail managers collecting requests across locations, and agencies that need freelancer availability in the same stream as staff leave. In Focus mode it feels like a quick message exchange on a phone, which is where most requests get made.

Fit it to your policy. Rename the leave types to match your policy, add parental days or a compensatory-day option, and the conditional rule in the Logic panel can attach follow-up questions to any of them. Turn on email notifications so the manager gets each request in their inbox, or point a signed webhook at your team channel so requests land where approvals happen. Before the summer crunch, export the CSV and you have an instant coverage calendar. If your company needs formal extended leave with documentation, keep this form fast and link the separate leave-request template for the heavy cases, since mixing the two is how both get worse.