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 possible fix — it keeps the thirty-second ask thirty seconds long, but leaves a record that managers, payroll, and the requester all see the same way.

Why these fields. Name and team identify the requester without a login. The type selector matters more than it looks: vacation, sick, personal, bereavement, and jury duty are tracked differently in most payroll systems, and some carry legal protections, so classifying at the source saves reconciliation later. The two date fields define the range explicitly — a single free-text "dates" box produces answers like "around Easter week", which is exactly 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. When the request names its own cover, approval becomes a formality. And thanks to a conditional rule, the doctor's-note question appears only when a sick day is selected — vacation requesters never see it.

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

Who uses this. 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 are made.

Make it yours. 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 appear where approvals actually 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 — mixing the two is how both get worse.