Three shift-based teams got rid of the absence bottleneck

Every day-off request lands on your desk

Every request for a day off comes to you. So does every "how many days do I have left?", and the honest answer is that the spreadsheet is a week out of date. You approve, you update the sheet when you remember, and a fortnight later a holiday balance is wrong on someone's payslip and you're rebuilding it by hand from approvals you half remember.

Meanwhile an approved holiday never made it onto the roster, so a shift goes uncovered, and somewhere a chunk of non-statutory leave quietly expired that you'll now have to pay out. Handled by hand, absence costs more than an afternoon. It parks you in the middle as the bottleneck, keeps the balances wrong, and quietly leaks money out the back.

Absence off your desk, every time

Run absence in Shiftbase, on top of the schedule and the hours the team clocks, and the bottleneck, the wrong balances and the leaked money all go away. More than 8,500 businesses now run their schedules, hours and absence on Shiftbase. The three teams below took themselves out of the middle, each a different way.

Tomingroep: from six planners to four who just approve

At Tomingroep's cleaning department (facility services, around 90 people), absence and hours sat with one planner, and every request meant a manual check. That setup was slow and fragile: the schedule lived in Excel, the weekly plan was copied over by hand, and if the one planner was away the whole thing stalled. There was no easy way to see whether a shift pushed someone past the 48-hour working-time limit, either.

Now each employee requests time off in the app and sees their own balance, the plan carries from week to week on its own, and the foreman approves against the live schedule instead of fielding the question, with the working-time limits visible while they do it. Planning went from six people to four foremen who only approve, scheduling and leave admin take about 20% less time, and the questions about schedules and absence dried up. "Shiftbase offers the opportunity to look ahead," says Django Stoutenburg, operational planner at Tomingroep.

The Fun Group: the balances are right, so the arguments stop

The Fun Group (hospitality, 50-100 employees) runs seven tourism and events businesses across Amsterdam and London, and used to build its schedule off the booking system while staff logged hours by hand for HR to turn into wages. With different labour agreements across the companies, nobody could see how many holiday hours were left, so holiday pay was a monthly source of confusion.

Now every employee sees their own balance, tied to the hours they actually work, across the companies running on Shiftbase, so the number is right and the payday arguments went away. Processing the hours and allowances that used to take a full stretch of admin now takes half the time. "My biggest compliment: we wouldn't survive now without Shiftbase," says Timo of The Fun Group.

Bomenbezorgd: absence and worked hours, on the same set of books

Bomenbezorgd.nl (retail, 50-100 employees) delivers trees and plants with a mix of office staff, drivers and freelancers, and was growing fast while still tracking hours in Excel, with drivers submitting their hours at the end of the day. As it grew, that lost the team visibility over who was back and what had actually been worked. It came to Shiftbase for one thing: a link between hours worked and absence requests.

Now drivers clock in on their own phones, location-based, and request time off in the app, and through the AFAS link the absence, the worked hours and the wage costs flow through to payroll together, so what's paid matches what's owed. Building the roster alone now takes over 20% less time. "We looked for a link between hours worked and all leave requests. That's how we came across Shiftbase," says Liset Schiphorst, Operational Manager at Bomenbezorgd.

Three routes, one outcome

Three teams, three routes. One gave the foremen an approve-only view, one tied leave balances to hours actually worked, one put absence and worked hours on the same books. You don't get one template dropped on every business. You pick the route that fits yours. What they share is the outcome: the team manages its own absence, and the numbers are right when payroll needs them.