The Sheet Breaks At A Predictable Point
Under ten people with fixed days off, a shared spreadsheet is still the correct answer and it costs nothing. Once accrual rates and carryover caps arrive, buy a tracker. Calamari lists its Time Off module at $2.50 per employee per month billed yearly, with a $240 per year minimum. BambooHR starts at $10 per employee per month, with a $250 monthly minimum for companies of 25 or fewer.
The trigger is not headcount by itself. It is the first time two people disagree about a balance and nobody can prove who is right.
That argument costs more than any of these subscriptions. It also tends to arrive during a resignation, when the balance turns into money.
What A Leave Spreadsheet Actually Costs
The sheet is free, so the cost shows up as time and risk instead of an invoice. Both are easy to underrate until you count them.
Say a manager spends twenty minutes a week fielding requests, updating cells and answering balance questions. That is roughly 17 hours a year, or half a working week, on arithmetic a tool does for a few dollars a head.
The second cost is quieter. A spreadsheet stores a number, not a decision, so it cannot tell you who approved a day off or when the request was made.
Most teams only discover that gap during a dispute. By then the evidence is a chat message somebody has to go hunting for.
There is a third cost that only appears at year end. Someone has to recalculate every balance, apply the carryover rule and roll the sheet forward, and that job usually lands on the person with the least time.
Three Failure Modes That Arrive Before Anyone Complains
The first is version drift. Somebody downloads a copy for a meeting, edits it, then emails it back, and two versions of the truth now exist.
The second is formula damage. A single sort on the wrong column, or a row inserted outside a SUM range, breaks a calculation that nobody re-checks because the numbers still look plausible.
The third is access. Leave data includes medical and family-related absence, so the sheet holding it should not sit in a folder the whole company can browse.
None of these announce themselves. They surface weeks later, usually when a departing employee asks what their final payout should be.
That is the same pattern behind most quiet software problems in a small company. Nothing fails loudly, so nothing gets fixed until it becomes expensive.
What The Cheapest Real Options Charge
- ● Calamari Time Off from 2.50 per employee monthly
- ● BambooHR Core from 10 per employee monthly
- ● Homebase Plus flat at 56 monthly billed yearly
Prices below come from each vendor’s published pricing page in August 2026. Confirm current pricing on the official site before you commit, since minimums and bundles change more often than headline rates.
| Option | Listed price | Minimum or limit | Trial | What you get for it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared spreadsheet | $0 | None | n/a | Full flexibility, no audit trail, manual accruals |
| Calamari Time Off | $2.50 per employee per month billed yearly, $3 monthly | $240 per year, roughly a 10-seat floor | 14 days, no card | Leave requests, approvals, policy rules, calendars |
| Homebase Basic | $0 | Up to 10 employees, 1 location | n/a | Scheduling and basic time clock, no PTO controls |
| Homebase Plus | $70 per month, or $56 per month billed yearly | Unlimited employees | 14-day All-in-One trial | Scheduling, time clock and PTO controls at a flat rate |
| BambooHR Core | $10 per employee per month | $250 per month for 25 employees or fewer | Not published | Time-off management, employee records, reporting |
Read that table as two pricing shapes rather than five products. Per-employee pricing rewards small teams, while flat pricing rewards teams that expect to grow.
At twelve employees, Calamari’s Time Off module lands near $30 a month, while Homebase Plus costs $56 a month billed yearly for the same coverage. At sixty employees the ranking flips hard, and the same logic that drives per-user versus flat-rate pricing decides your answer.
BambooHR sits in a different category. Its $250 monthly minimum for teams of 25 or fewer only makes sense if you want employee records, onboarding and reporting alongside leave, which the wider HR software options for small business cover in more detail.
Homebase deserves a note for shift-based teams. PTO controls sit in the Plus plan rather than the free Basic tier or Essentials, and payroll is a separate add-on listed at $39 per month plus $6 per employee.
Five Questions To Ask Before You Pay
Leave tools look alike on a feature list. These five questions separate them, and every one of them has bitten a small team that skipped it.
Who counts as a billable user? Calamari states that admins and managers count as active users, while archived employees do not. A ten-person team with two managers may therefore be billed for twelve.
Does it enforce carryover automatically? Some tools expire excess days on a date you set. Others simply display the cap and leave enforcement to you, which puts you back where you started.
Can you record leave in hours as well as days? Part-time staff and half-day appointments break any system that only understands whole days.
Can an admin correct an approved request after the fact? People forget to log sick days. A tool that refuses corrections quietly pushes everyone back into a side spreadsheet.
What comes out at year end? Ask for a balance export per person, in a format your payroll provider accepts. Final-pay calculations depend on it.
Trial periods are the cheapest way to answer these. Calamari offers 14 days without a card, and Homebase offers a 14-day All-in-One trial, which is enough to run one real approval cycle.
Accrual Rules Are Where Sheets Quietly Go Wrong
- ● Mid year hires need pro rated opening balances
- ● Carryover caps expire silently in December
- ● Negative balances become payroll disputes
Fixed allowances are easy. Twenty days a year, minus what people take, and a spreadsheet handles that for a long time.
Accrual is a different animal. Once leave builds up per month or per pay period, four errors show up again and again.
Mid-year hires. Someone joining in September should not receive a full annual allowance, and the pro-rated figure has to be recalculated whenever they change hours.
Carryover caps. A rule that lets people carry five days into the new year needs enforcing on a specific date, and a sheet will happily carry twenty.
Negative balances. Approving leave that has not accrued yet is a normal favour, but it becomes a payroll deduction if that person leaves, and nobody tracks it.
Part-time conversions. Moving from five days a week to three changes both the accrual rate and the value of a day already banked.
A worked example shows how fast this gets fiddly. On a 20-day annual allowance, leave accrues at 1.67 days per month.
Someone who starts on 15 September has 3.5 months left in the calendar year, which is 5.8 days. Round that to 6 days and you have quietly given away a fifth of a day, which is fine until you do it for nine hires and someone reconciles the total.
Now add a mid-year switch from five days a week to four. The accrual rate drops to 1.33 days per month, and the days already banked at the old rate keep their original value in hours.
Software does not make these decisions for you. It does apply whichever rule you configured to every person, every month, without anyone remembering to.
Leave entitlements are also set by law in many places, and the rules differ by country and by state. Check the statutory minimum and record-keeping duties where your staff actually work before you write your policy.
Who Should Switch And Who Should Stay Put
- ● Under ten people keep the sheet
- ● Accrual policies need software
- ● Shift teams should start with scheduling
Under ten people, one location, fixed days: stay on the sheet. Protect it properly, restrict edit access to one owner, and revisit the decision when you hire past ten.
Fifteen to fifty people with accrual or carryover: switch, and treat it as the cheapest insurance you buy this year. A per-employee leave module is the low-cost entry point.
Shift or hourly teams: start with scheduling rather than a leave tracker, because availability, shift swaps and time off are the same conversation. A flat-rate plan that bundles all three usually beats two subscriptions.
Fully remote across states or countries: switch early. Different statutory entitlements per location is exactly the situation a sheet handles worst.
Anyone already paying for payroll or an HR platform: check what you own before buying anything. Leave tracking is frequently bundled and switched off, and an audit of your existing stack can surface it, much like the seats found in a SaaS subscription cleanup.
How To Move A Year Of Balances Without An Argument
Migration goes wrong in one specific way: opening balances that nobody agreed to. Fix that first and the rest is data entry.
Pick a freeze date, ideally the start of a month or your leave year. Publish the balance for every person from the sheet as of that date and ask each of them to confirm it in writing.
Import the agreed figures as opening balances, then configure the accrual rule and the carryover cap before anyone books anything. Test the setup with one real request end to end.
Run both systems for a single cycle if you can. One month of parallel running catches configuration mistakes while the sheet is still there as a reference.
Then archive the spreadsheet as read-only and tell people plainly that requests made anywhere else do not count. A tool that half the team ignores is worse than the sheet you left behind.
The Switch Point In One Sentence
Move when your policy stops being a number and becomes a rule. Fixed days for a small group belong in a sheet, and accrual, carryover and pro-rating belong in software that applies them the same way every month.
At small headcounts the price of being right is a few dollars per person, against a $240 per year floor at the cheapest end and $250 per month at the HR-platform end. Confirm the current figures on each vendor page, because the shape of the pricing matters more than today’s rate.
If you are weighing the wider question of when a manual process has outgrown itself, the same reasoning appears in moving from spreadsheets to a CRM. The signal is identical: the moment the sheet needs a rule, it needs a system.
Vendor pages referenced here are BambooHR pricing, Calamari pricing and Homebase pricing.
FAQ
At what size does a small business need time off software?
There is no legal headcount that forces a tool. The practical trigger is policy complexity. Fixed days off for a handful of people stay manageable in a sheet, while accrual rates, carryover caps and pro-rated new hires create balances that need an audit trail. Most small teams feel the strain somewhere between fifteen and thirty people.
Can payroll software handle time off tracking instead?
Yes, and that is often the cheapest route. Homebase lists PTO and time-off controls in its Plus plan at $70 per month, or $56 per month billed annually, for unlimited employees. BambooHR includes time-off management in its Core package at $10 per employee per month. Check whether your payroll provider already bundles leave before buying a separate tracker.
Is a dedicated leave tracker cheaper than a full HR platform?
Dedicated leave tools price by employee, so the math favours them for small headcounts. Calamari lists its Time Off module at $2.50 per employee per month billed yearly, with a $240 per year minimum. A flat-rate plan such as Homebase Plus costs the same whether you have twelve staff or ninety. The crossover point depends entirely on headcount.
What happens to the old spreadsheet after we migrate?
Keep it, but make it read-only. Freeze the sheet on a chosen date, get every balance confirmed in writing by the person it belongs to, then import those figures as opening balances. The archived sheet becomes your evidence if someone questions a balance from before the switch.
Does a spreadsheet satisfy record-keeping requirements for leave?
Rarely, and that is the risk. A spreadsheet records what someone typed, not who approved what and when. Leave rules differ by country and by state, and some require records you can produce on request. Confirm the record-keeping duties that apply where your staff actually work before you rely on a sheet.
Sources
- Vacation Leave | U.S. Department of Labor — checked 2026-10-01
- BambooHR Plans and Pricing — checked 2026-10-01
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How this article was made: it was drafted with AI assistance from the official sources listed above, and its figures were checked against those pages on the dates shown. It is not based on personal hands-on testing.
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