A Slack leave tracker your team never has to leave

How the Slack leave tracker works

Connect your Slack workspace to Absenca once. There's no member mapping: the first time someone uses /absenca, Absenca links them by their Slack email address. From then on an employee types /absenca leave, chooses the leave type and dates in a Slack form, and submits. Any blackout periods that apply are shown in the form, and the request routes to the right approver automatically.

The approver gets a direct message with who's asking, the leave type, the dates, the number of days and any note, plus Approve and Reject buttons. One tap decides it: the message updates to show who decided, the employee gets a direct message with the answer, the shared calendar updates, and the balance adjusts. Nobody chased anyone, and nothing needs re-typing later.

If you want ambient visibility, switch on the summary: a post to a channel of your choice listing who's away, every day or every Monday. Teams that run stand-ups in Slack usually point it at that channel — the "is anyone out today?" question disappears.

Every /absenca command

For everyone: /absenca leave requests time off, /absenca balance shows what's left, /absenca whosout lists who's away today and this week, /absenca toil logs overtime as time off in lieu, /absenca holidays lists the next public holidays, /absenca blackouts shows blocked dates, /absenca entitlements shows your leave entitlements, /absenca calendar shows your month at a glance, /absenca status lets Absenca set your Slack status while you're on leave, and /absenca help lists what you can run.

For managers: /absenca pending lists the requests waiting on them, with Approve and Reject buttons, /absenca pendingtoil does the same for overtime, /absenca teambalance and /absenca member look up a teammate, and /absenca stats and /absenca reports summarise the team. Admins can also correct a balance with /absenca adjust and read the audit log with /absenca audit.

Replies to commands are visible only to the person who ran them, so nobody's balance lands in a public channel. Half days and hourly leave are booked in the web app.

Why chat-first leave tracking actually sticks

Adoption is the hard part of any leave tool. A tracker that requires a separate login gets used by HR and ignored by everyone else, and the moment employees stop self-serving, the admin is back to being a human middleware layer. Putting requests and approvals in Slack removes the friction that kills adoption: there's nothing new to open, nothing to install per user, and approvals happen where managers already are.

Because Absenca records every chat action against the same balances, policies and audit log as the web app, the convenience costs you nothing: HR still gets accurate accruals, exportable reports and a defensible history — see all features for what runs underneath.

A vacation tracker for Slack, with no more “who approved this?”

Approvals in chat usually leave no trace: a thumbs-up in a thread, a DM nobody can find a month later. Absenca records every request and decision made in Slack against the same history as the web app, with who decided and when, so when a balance is questioned there's an answer.

Balances reflect an approval the moment it's given, and managers can still open the web dashboard for the bigger picture: coverage across the team, overlapping requests and reports.

What HR controls

Slack is where people ask and answer; the rules stay with HR. Each request goes to the requester's managers, or to the organisation's admins when nobody manages them, and while every manager of a department is on leave, the department's backup approver gets it too. Department limits, blackout periods and balances are checked when the request is submitted, in Slack as on the web.

An approval in Slack moves the days from pending to taken on the employee's balance at once. Every decision is recorded with who made it and when, and reading the audit log, on the web or with /absenca audit, is on Pro and the Custom Pack, not on the free Starter plan.

Set it up in a few minutes

1) Create your free Absenca account. 2) Open Settings → Integrations and choose Connect Slack, then approve the permissions on Slack's consent screen. 3) Optionally pick a channel for the who's-off summary, and turn on auto-status; each person then runs /absenca status once to let Absenca set theirs. That's the whole setup — our step-by-step Slack time-off bot guide walks through it.

The Slack bot is on Pro and the Custom Pack, not on the free Starter plan, with no per-integration fee on top. Absenca is free for up to 10 people. Pro is $37.50 a month for up to 50 people, or $33.75 a month billed annually ($405 a year).