Excel alternative for the staff holiday spreadsheet: leave tracking at €1.30 per user, no formulas, no emailed copies

Nobody chose Excel as their leave tracker. It was already open. Someone built a staff holiday spreadsheet one January afternoon, one row per person, one column per day, a yellow cell for holiday and a red one for sick, and it worked, because the team was six people and the person who built it also approved the requests. That is the honest starting point of any Bueggio HR vs Excel comparison: for a team of three, the spreadsheet is the right tool and we will say so again further down. Teams go looking for an alternative to the Excel leave tracker template after three discoveries, and they usually arrive in this order. The sheet has one owner, and every request, change and question goes through that person, by email, WhatsApp or a tap on the shoulder. The balances are wrong and nobody knows since when: a pasted row, a formula that stopped at December, a public holiday counted as a day off. And the file is personal data: who was sick, when and for how long, visible to everyone with the link and copied into every inbox it was ever sent to. Here is the point-by-point case, costs included, for the alternative, plus our free spreadsheet for anyone who reads to the end and still prefers Excel.

The short answer: Bueggio HR is the alternative to the Excel leave tracker for teams of five to fifty: employees book from their phones, managers approve with one click from email, Slack or Teams, the wall chart and every balance update themselves, public holidays for 45+ countries and the statutory rules of Italy, France and Spain are built in, sick leave is visible only to the people who should see it, and the whole thing costs €1.30 per user per month, everything included, with a month free and no card. Excel keeps what it has always had: it is already paid for, infinitely flexible, works offline, needs no onboarding and is perfectly adequate for three people who sit in the same room. The line between the two is not the price. It is the afternoon your office manager spends fixing the sheet each month, and the day someone forwards it.

At a glance

	Bueggio HR	Excel
What it is	Staff leave tracking for small teams: request, approve, wall chart	A general-purpose spreadsheet (see microsoft.com) turned into a leave tracker by hand, with a template or by a colleague who is good with formulas
Price	€1.30 per user/month, everything included (−15% billed yearly), no minimum, no setup fee	Included in the Microsoft 365 plan you already pay (Business Basic is around €6 per user per month since the July 2026 price change), plus the time of whoever maintains the file
Free trial	1 month, no card	Not needed: you have it already
Time to set up	The same afternoon: sign up, import the team from CSV or invite by email, book	An afternoon for the first version; then every January, every new joiner, every rule change
Who keeps it right	The software: working days, public holidays, half days, carry-over and country rules are computed, not typed	One person, by hand, in cells that nobody else dares to touch
Who sees what	Roles and a visibility setting: the wall chart can be opened to everyone or limited to each person's department or to approvers; the request note and any certificate reach only approvers and admins	Everyone with the file sees everyone's absences, sick days included, and every copy ever emailed keeps showing them
Data hosting	EU only · Frankfurt, Germany · EU company · DPA published	OneDrive or SharePoint in the EU for European Microsoft 365 tenants (EU Data Boundary, completed February 2025); the copies in inboxes, downloads and phones are wherever they were sent
Best for	Teams of five to fifty anywhere in Europe that want leave tracking to run itself	Teams of two to five, a single approver, no sick-leave privacy concern, and someone who enjoys formulas

Pricing: the free spreadsheet, costed honestly

Excel's strongest argument is that it costs nothing, and it is almost true. The licence is already in the Microsoft 365 subscription your company pays for email: Business Basic, the cheapest plan with Excel on the web and on mobile, is around €6 per user per month since Microsoft's July 2026 price rise, and you would pay it with or without a leave tracker. So the spreadsheet's marginal cost is zero, and the only cost that counts is the one nobody writes down: the hours. Someone enters each request, checks it against the team, updates the balance, answers "how many days do I have left", fixes the formula that broke when a new joiner was pasted in, and rebuilds the whole thing every January. Three hours a month is a modest estimate for a 20-person team; at a fully loaded €25 an hour, which is what a junior office role costs an employer in most of Western Europe, that is €75 a month, or €900 a year, for a file that still cannot approve anything. Bueggio HR has one plan: €1.30 per user per month with every feature included, €1.105 billed yearly, no setup fee, no minimum users. A 20-person team pays €22.10 a month on yearly billing, €265 a year, and gets the hours back.

Bueggio HR · 20 users, everything included €22.10

Excel · the licence (already in Microsoft 365) €0 extra

Excel · 3 hours a month of someone's time about €75

The time bar is our assumption, not a measurement: 3 hours a month of an office manager or team lead at €25 an hour fully loaded. Your numbers may be lower (a disciplined team of eight) or much higher (anyone who has rebuilt a leave sheet in January). Work out your own hourly cost with the employer cost calculator and multiply by the hours you actually spend.

Seven quiet ways the leave spreadsheet fails

None of these show up on the day the sheet is built. They show up in month four, with a new joiner, a public holiday or a sick week, and they are the reasons this page exists.

1. It has an owner. Only one person can safely edit the file, so every request becomes a message to that person, and that person's holiday becomes everyone's problem.
2. It is wrong, quietly. Raymond Panko's field audits at the University of Hawaii found errors in 88% of the spreadsheets inspected, and a leave tracker is a spreadsheet: a balance formula that stops at a column, a public holiday counted as a day off, a row sorted away from its name. The sheet never says "I am wrong". It just shows a number.
3. It truncates. In October 2020 Public Health England lost 15,841 positive Covid tests because the .xls files used to load results hit the 65,536-row ceiling and cut the rest off without a warning. Your leave sheet will never reach that size, but it uses the same tool with the same habit of failing silently.
4. It multiplies. "leave_2026_v3_FINAL.xlsx" is sent, downloaded, edited on a phone, sent back. Which copy is true is a question with no answer, and every copy keeps the sick days of everyone in it.
5. It cannot approve. The approval happens somewhere else: a reply, a thumbs-up, a nod, and then someone types it into the sheet, or forgets to.
6. It does not know the calendar. Working days, the public holidays of each person's country, half days, the carry-over deadline, the pro-rata allowance of someone who joined in March: each is a formula to write, test and maintain, and each is where the wrong number comes from.
7. It shows everything to everyone. The same grid that tells the team who is off next week tells the team who was sick in February, for how long, and sometimes why, in the notes column. Under the GDPR, health data is special-category data, and a shared spreadsheet has no concept of "approvers only".

Feature-by-feature comparison

	Bueggio HR	Excel
Employees book their own leave	✓ from any phone, with the balance and the team's absences in view	They ask; someone with the file types it in
Approval flow	✓ approver per department or per person, one click from the email, Slack or Teams, with a reason on decline and a full audit trail	No: approval lives in email or chat; the sheet records the result, if someone remembers
Shared wall chart / team calendar	✓ live, filtered by department, pending requests shaded, holidays and date locks shown	✓ the grid itself, as current as its last edit; one tab per month or one very wide sheet
Balances	✓ computed: allowance, used, pending, remaining, carry-over with a cap and an expiry, pro-rata for joiners, per-person adjustments	Formulas you write and maintain; correct until the first pasted row
Working days and public holidays	✓ 45+ national calendars chosen per person, plus regional and company days added once by an admin; a Saturday or a bank holiday never costs a day	NETWORKDAYS and a holiday list you keep by hand, per country, every year
Half days	✓ morning or afternoon, counted as 0.5 everywhere, shown as a half cell	A letter code and a formula that remembers to count it as 0.5, if you built it that way
Country rules: Italian ROL, French RTT, Spanish convenios	✓ built in, enabled by country at signup	Rebuilt in cells, by you, from the law or the collective agreement
Sick leave privacy	✓ the wall chart can be limited to each person's department or to approvers only; notes, decline reasons and medical certificates reach only approvers and admins, and certificates are purged on erasure	No: whoever opens the file sees the red cells, the type and the notes, in every copy
Date locks and department absence caps	✓ block bookings over a closure or a peak week; cap how many of a team are off on the same day	A note in a cell and the discipline to read it
Notifications and reminders	✓ email, push, Slack, Teams; daily "who is off" summaries to a channel; out-of-office reminders	None
Slack and Microsoft Teams	✓ book with a command, approve from the message, automatic OOO status	A link to the file pinned in a channel
Google / Outlook calendar sync	✓ approved leave pushed to each person's calendar, iCal feeds per team	No
Audit trail	✓ who requested, approved, declined or cancelled what, when, with the reason	Version history in OneDrive, if the file lives there and nobody downloaded it
Reports and payroll	✓ per-person allowance report, monthly absence export as CSV or PDF for the payroll provider	✓ whatever you can build: it is Excel, after all
Mobile	✓ installable web app with push notifications, built for booking from a phone	Excel mobile: a 400-column grid on a 6-inch screen
Works offline, free-form, no vendor	No: a web app with a subscription, and a CSV export whenever you want out	✓ the spreadsheet's home ground
GDPR export and right to erasure	✓ self-serve, built in, DPA published	You are the controller and the tool: finding every copy of the file is your job
Setup effort	An afternoon, once	An afternoon, then every January

Five reasons the alternative wins once the team passes five people

1. A spreadsheet has an owner; a tool has a team

The leave sheet's real limit is not Excel's row count. It is that one person holds the pen. Every request lands on that person as a message, every "how many days do I have left" is a question for them, and when they are away the file stops. Bueggio HR hands the pen to everyone, safely: employees book from their phones with their balance in front of them, the request goes to the right approver, approver per department or per person, and the approval is one click from the email itself, with no login, or from the Slack or Teams message. The wall chart updates the moment the click lands. Nobody types anything into anything.

2. No formulas to trust

A leave balance is a surprisingly hard formula: working days minus public holidays of that person's country, half days as 0.5, the carry-over that expires on a date, the pro-rata allowance of someone who joined on the 14th of March, the adjustment for the two days granted after the product launch. In Excel each of these is a cell someone wrote and nobody has audited, which is exactly the kind of spreadsheet Panko's research is about. In Bueggio HR they are code, documented, tested, and the same for every customer: a request is quoted in working days before it is sent, the balance shows allowance, used, pending and remaining, and when a number needs to be corrected by hand it is an adjustment with a reason and a date, not an overwritten cell.

3. Sick days are health data

This is the argument most teams have not had yet, and it is the one that matters legally. A staff holiday spreadsheet does not only hold holidays: it holds who was sick, when, for how long, and often a note. Under the GDPR that is special-category data, and a file that is shared with the whole team, emailed as an attachment and downloaded to phones gives you no way to limit who sees it, no record of who opened it, and no way to delete it from the twenty inboxes it visited. Bueggio HR is built around roles: the wall chart tells the team that a colleague is off, and an admin can limit it to each person's department or to approvers only; the note and any certificate reach only approvers and admins, every action is logged, and when someone leaves the company the GDPR erasure scrubs their identity and purges their uploads in one step. Data lives in Frankfurt and nowhere else, under a published DPA. The point is not that Microsoft hosts badly; it does not. The point is that a spreadsheet cannot say "approvers only".

4. Country rules you would otherwise rebuild in cells

Most leave spreadsheet templates come from the United States, count calendar days and know one public-holiday list. A European team then adds the rules by hand: the Italian ROL and ex-festività counted in hours, the French count in jours ouvrables where Saturday is a working day for leave purposes, the Spanish convenio that grants extra days and a regional calendar, the UK's 28 days including bank holidays or not. Every one of those is a formula to get wrong. Bueggio HR ships with the rules of Italy, France and Spain implemented and switched on by country at signup, public holidays for 45+ countries chosen per person, and a working week per person for part-timers. The template is the product.

5. Cheaper than the hour it takes, and no lock-in

At €1.30 per user per month a 20-person team pays €22.10 a month, less than one hour of the time the spreadsheet quietly consumes, and the price includes everything: approvals in Slack and Teams, calendar push, date locks and absence caps, SSO, the API and webhooks, the MCP connector for AI assistants, the payroll export. The trial lasts a month and asks for no card. And because the honest fear with any tool that replaces a spreadsheet is "what if we want the spreadsheet back", every report exports to CSV and the GDPR export gives you the whole organisation as JSON, any time, self-serve. Excel will still be there. You just will not need to open it on the first of the month.

Where Excel is genuinely strong

An honest comparison cuts both ways, and here the other side is formidable. Excel is already paid for and already installed on every computer in the building, which no SaaS can say. It needs no onboarding: everyone knows how to type in a cell. It is infinitely flexible: the colour code for "working from the mountain house", the extra column for the company car, the pivot table your accountant asked for, all take a minute and no feature request. It works offline, on a train, in a warehouse with no signal. It has no vendor: no subscription to cancel, no company that could change its pricing or close, no data to export because the data is the file. For a team of two to five with one approver, no sick-leave sensitivity and a person who likes formulas, a well-built sheet is the right answer, and we will not pretend otherwise; our own free leave tracker template exists for exactly that team. On data protection, Excel in a European Microsoft 365 tenant is hosted in the EU too, since Microsoft completed its EU Data Boundary in February 2025. The spreadsheet's privacy problem is not where Microsoft keeps the file. It is what the file contains and who you sent it to.

Stay or switch: the spreadsheet check

Tick what is true of your leave sheet today. Three ticks or more and the sheet is costing you more than €1.30 a head.

• Only one person edits the file, and requests reach them by email, chat or in person.
• Someone has disputed their remaining balance in the last twelve months.
• The file has been emailed as an attachment, or a copy lives on someone's phone.
• Sick days are visible to people who are not managers.
• Two people were off on the same day last summer and nobody noticed until the Monday.
• People work in more than one country, or part-time, and the sheet counts the same days for all of them.
• Rebuilding the sheet for the new year took longer than an hour.

• Stay with Excel if you are five people or fewer with one approver in the same room, if nobody minds the whole team seeing sick days, if you have a colleague who enjoys maintaining the formulas, or if the sheet feeds a payroll process you cannot change this year.
• Switch to the alternative if the sheet's owner has become a bottleneck, if balances are disputed, if the file has ever travelled by email, if people work across countries or part-time, or if you would like approvals to take one click wherever the request lands.

Switching from Excel takes an afternoon

1. Save the people sheet as CSV. One row per person: email, first name, last name, role, department, annual allowance, start date, country. Bueggio HR's team import takes up to 500 rows with exactly those columns and creates unknown departments on the fly; a downloadable sample shows the header.
2. Enter the balances, once. Country defaults (national and regional holidays, ROL and ex-festività, RTT, convenio days) apply at signup; each person's remaining days from the sheet become an adjustment with a reason, so the first balance in Bueggio HR equals the last one in Excel, and from then on it computes itself.
3. Book from day one. Everyone gets an invitation by email, books from their phone and managers approve with one click. The first month is free, no card; the old file goes into the archive folder, not the bin, in case anyone ever asks about 2024.

Want the whole market first? Read our ranking of the best leave tracking apps, or the guide on how to track vacation time without software.

If you want to stay on Excel for now

Then at least start from a sheet that counts half days, carries balances across months and has no broken formulas. Our free leave tracker template is a shared Google Sheet: use File → Make a copy, or File → Download → Microsoft Excel to work in Excel. No email address, no sign-up. The guide to the template explains the letter codes and the COUNTIF formulas, and the leave plan template covers the summer planning that a grid alone cannot do. When the sheet starts failing in the seven ways above, you know where to find us; the import takes the same CSV.

Frequently asked questions

Is Excel good enough for tracking staff holidays?

For a team of two to five people with one approver, yes: a well-built sheet with letter codes and COUNTIF formulas shows who is off and how many days everyone has left, and it costs nothing beyond the Microsoft 365 plan you already pay. The limits grow with headcount: only one person can safely edit the file, every request has to be typed in by hand, balances drift when a formula breaks or a public holiday is counted, there is no approval flow, and everyone with the file sees everyone's sick days. Most teams hit at least one of those around ten people, which is where a leave tracker at €1.30 per user, such as Bueggio HR, becomes cheaper than the hours the sheet consumes.

Is it GDPR compliant to track sick leave in an Excel file?

It can be, but only with controls a shared spreadsheet rarely has. Sickness records are health data, a special category under Article 9 of the GDPR, so the employer must limit who can see them, keep them only as long as needed and be able to delete them. A leave sheet emailed to the whole team, downloaded to phones and visible to every colleague fails all three: there is no access control, no record of who opened it and no way to recall the copies. The file's location is not the issue; Microsoft 365 data of EU tenants is stored in the EU. The issue is the copies and the audience. Bueggio HR restricts notes and certificates to approvers and admins by role, can limit the wall chart to each person's department, logs every action, hosts data in Frankfurt only under a published DPA and offers self-serve GDPR export and erasure.

How do I move my leave spreadsheet into Bueggio HR?

Export the people list as a CSV with one row per person (email, first and last name, role, department, annual allowance, start date, country) and upload it in Settings → Team: the import takes up to 500 rows, creates missing departments and sends every person an invitation. Enter each person's remaining balance from the sheet as an adjustment, so the first balance in Bueggio HR matches the last one in Excel; public holidays and country rules are already there. Past absences do not need to be re-typed: keep the old file as an archive. The whole move takes an afternoon, the first month is free with no card, and every report exports back to CSV at any time.