A team vacation calendar for the work you're planning

Start with the week you're staffing. The useful question is whether the people who can do the work will be available, not just whether a calendar cell contains a name.

Use a shared PTO calendar as the record of approved leave¶

Keep confirmed absences together and make their approval status unambiguous. A shared PTO calendar should help a manager assess a new request and help employees plan handoffs around existing leave. Treat it as the record of agreed dates, with requests and unresolved decisions tracked in the request workflow.

In Cabana, Calendar opens Team Calendar. Select a department or All departments, then choose Filter. Move between months to review an upcoming launch, the next payroll close, or the week your office manager wants to take off.

The calendar shows approved leave alongside applicable public holidays and blocked dates. Pending requests don't appear. If someone says their dates are missing, open the request and look at its status before adding a separate manual calendar entry.

Review the people doing the work, not just the department name. A cross-team handoff may depend on someone outside the filtered view; return to All departments when you need the wider picture. Use the manager PTO approval checklist before recording the decision.

Choose a shared Google or Outlook calendar when manual upkeep is enough¶

Use a shared calendar when you mainly need a place to display dates everyone has already agreed. Choose a PTO calendar when the approval and balance need to determine what appears. Both can show who's away; the difference is where the decision happens and who keeps the displayed dates accurate.

Custom automation can connect a manual calendar to other systems. Use it when someone owns that setup and its upkeep. A calendar backed by requests is useful when the office manager wants one recorded decision to drive the absence view.

Bring the who's-out calendar into the morning conversation¶

Put availability updates in the channel where your team plans its day. Use a daily post for today's absences and a weekly post for the coming workweek. The goal is to make approved dates visible before someone assigns work to a teammate who is already away.

Cabana offers Out today and Monday digest in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Choose the channel in Settings → Integrations, enable the posts you want, and select Save. Department filters can narrow those announcements to the relevant group.

Out today lists employee names. Monday digest lists who's away and their days within the working week. Posts follow the organization's time zone and skip empty lists. Approval doesn't immediately broadcast a future absence to the channel.

For a check between posts, use /pto whosout in Slack or send whosout to Cabana in Teams. In a Teams channel, mention @Cabana whosout. Full command and setup references live in PTO tracking in Slack and PTO tracking in Microsoft Teams.

Subscribe from Google Calendar or Outlook¶

Use the calendar feed when people plan their day in Google Calendar or Outlook. Cabana publishes approved time off as all-day events through a private subscription URL. This is a read-only subscription, not two-way sync: request changes belong in Cabana, and the calendar app controls when its subscribed view refreshes.

1. Open Settings → Integrations in Cabana and copy the calendar feed URL.
2. In Google Calendar, use the + beside Other calendars, choose From URL, and paste it.
3. In Outlook, choose Add calendar → Subscribe from web, paste the URL, and save the subscription.

Use whichever calendar your team works in; you don't need both. The feed includes approved leave across the organization, rather than inheriting the department selection you used in Cabana.

For a decision you need to make now, use Cabana's current calendar. A newly approved or canceled request may take time to appear in the subscribed app. The calendar feed guide walks through setup.

How many people can be out at once?¶

Start with the staffing you need for the work, then leave a reserve for an unexpected absence. A useful planning rule is scheduled, qualified staff minus required staff minus reserve. Apply it to each day and essential role; a company-wide percentage can hide the one person needed to keep a function running.

For a service team with six qualified people scheduled, four needed to cover the work, and one held in reserve, the planned-absence budget is 6 − 4 − 1 = 1 person. Without that reserve, two people could be away, leaving no room for an unexpected absence.

Use that calculation as a starting point for a manager's decision, not a universal staffing standard. Look at public holidays, other approved leave, and whether the proposed backup is actually qualified and available on those dates.

Cabana can hold that line for you. Set Maximum teammates away on a leave type in the policy, and a new request is blocked at submission once that many coworkers in the same department are already approved for any of the dates. Review the calendar too: the limit counts heads, not skills.

Blocked dates solve a different problem: they prevent requests during a defined period for the relevant organization, department, or location. They aren't a substitute for reviewing day-to-day coverage.

Share availability without collecting personal explanations¶

Keep shared calendar information focused on when people are away. A leave type and date range can help the team plan without publishing the personal reason behind a request. Put sensitive context in the private approver note when submitting through Cabana's web form rather than treating a general note as confidential.

The subscribed feed masks private leave types as Private leave. For non-private requests, a general note may appear in the event description. Anyone holding the feed URL can read its events, so keep that URL inside the company and regenerate it if it has been shared outside.

Plan your team's time off with Cabana¶

Choose Cabana when your team wants the calendar connected to a real request and decision. Employees request and managers approve in Slack or Microsoft Teams; PTO tracking software for small teams keeps the approved dates and balances together behind that daily workflow.

One plan costs $4 per user per month, with a $20/month minimum. Try it for 30 days without a credit card. For the process behind fair decisions, use Vacation policy best practices and How to run a fair vacation bid.

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