How to track PTO in Slack, without another dashboard

The usual way to track PTO is another tab: a tracker with its own login, a spreadsheet with formulas someone maintains, a wall calendar that was accurate in March. If your team already lives in Slack, the tracker can be a question instead.

The boundary first, as always: this is the leave half of an HR assistant. The Free tier covers up to 5 Employees, with policy answers and Leave Requests; Leave Policies with monthly Accrual sit in the Team tier, at $4 per employee per month. Nothing below depends on reading the pricing page generously.

Here is the whole loop, as your team sees it:

Where the number comes from

That 11.66 is not a guess and not a cache. The balance grows by a monthly grant on the anniversary of the hire date, is stored to four decimal places, and is reported to two — rounded down, so the bot never states more days than are actually held. The full arithmetic, including what happens to someone hired on the 31st, is worked through in how a Leave Balance accrues, with the same calculator the numbers come from.

One edge worth naming here: without a hire date, nothing accrues — the bot does not guess a tenure, and the missing date is surfaced to your HR Head as the one failure they can actually fix.

From question to filed Request

"Can I take next Friday off?" is not a message somebody has to read. The Request is filed and the Approval Chain starts in the same step, and the Chain's first step is the Lead — the card lands in their Slack, not in a queue nobody checks. The approvals page draws that card.

The Leave Balance moves when the Request is approved, not when it is filed — so the number your teammate reads five minutes after you ask for Friday is still true.

What your HR Head does once

Someone has to say what the policy is: how many days a year, from when. Your HR Head sets the Leave Policy once — in the dashboard, or by telling the bot to configure it — and the HR Head guide covers keeping it honest. After that, the tracking is nobody's job: the arithmetic runs monthly, the answers arrive where the questions already are, and the only person who ever opens a dashboard is the one writing the policy.

For a team of up to 5 Employees, all of this costs nothing. If you want to check the arithmetic before trusting it with your days, start with the accrual post — it names its own edges too.