A Leave Management System Should Make Your Life Easier
LeaveWizard is a fully bootstrapped small business with customers in more than 30 countries around the world. Running since 2011, we now supply our leave management system to organisations on five continents. We are a UK company, based in Bournemouth, Dorset. We are constantly evolving and innovating in our mission to help our clients save time, money, and frustration with a better and greener employee leave system.
Our Motivation to Create LeaveWizard
In this day and age, we find it hard to believe that spreadsheets and paper are still the number one tool used to manage staff annual leave and absence. It is easy to ignore the fact that many businesses print paper forms to request and approve leave! It seems that the world around us has evolved dramatically, but staff leave management tools haven’t kept up with today’s needs.
So we decided to develop an online employee leave planner that allows you to track and manage your employee’s holiday and absence at the click of a button and on any device.
The Problem With Tracking Annual Leave on a Spreadsheet
You cannot tell the state of play from a spreadsheet. Without a vast amount of formulae, it’s difficult to see if people always have the Monday after a big football match off, or if someone always calls in sick every 3rd Thursday.
- From an employee’s perspective, it can be difficult to know whether a request will be approved or not.
- Managers always worry that the spreadsheet is not up to date, and or that you might not know whose request came in first if they approve on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis.
- From an HR perspective, a spreadsheet makes it difficult to track how many days of holiday each individual employee has remained, and encourages them to use it up.
- Is it business-critical to have cover for particular people to have their roles ‘covered’ while they are off, like receptionists, or teachers?
- Or is it important that 2 people cannot be off at the same time?
There is a limit to what a spreadsheet can do when tracking employee/staff annual leave
Why Trust us With Your Annual Leave Planner?
Across our team, we have many years of experience in managing teams, in many different industries, so we have seen the challenges and pitfalls of managing staff leave and absence first hand.
Beyond the insufficiencies of paper forms and spreadsheets, we noticed other inefficiencies. We found that some large HR systems have clumsy and confusing user interfaces, systems offering little value over manual methods or tools that looked promising but were way too simplistic. Systems that showed a lack of understanding of the reality of leave management in modern businesses.
We believe that managing leave should be a task that takes moments, not minutes, which is exactly what a good online system should allow you to do. And so, we created LeaveWizard.
How Does Our Online Leave Management System Solve This Problem?
Our Mission: LeaveWizard is a purposeful, innovative, lean organization, that aims to (1) Help our customers make progress by delivering value in everything we do (2) Help our people grow and achieve their goals in life and (3) Achieve a sustainable growth of the business to allow us to continue investing in 1 & 2.
Our Vision: An easy-to-use, yet comprehensive, customisable, online leave planner, which will completely replace Excel trackers and paper forms.
Our Approach: To keep learning so that we build a product loved by our customers. And so far, we think our approach is working – check out our testimonials!
Our Ethos: We grow our way. We haven’t ever brought in outside financing and we have no intention of doing so. This is important in providing the freedom to shape our company and its business practices.
We are very proud that we are a UK Company, trading from Bournemouth. We are proud that we have built this business with zero external investment. We answer emails personally and we stand by our product and our brand. We are technical people, so we are always looking for ways to improve, developing new gizmos and playing with new gadgets.
We are passionate, authentic, and driven and we are truly interested in listening to what you have to say.
Each team member brings a different set of skills and expertise. We’re constantly evolving so our entire team are specialists in their area.
So, who are the faces behind the planner?

Plamen Balkanski
Operations Lead & Founder
Plamen is the organiser, driving us all towards building software systems that make people’s lives better. Plamen oversees all aspects of LeaveWizard’s business processes.

Rich Allen
Technology Lead & Founder
Rich is the passionate one. An active community organiser with unreal knowledge and skills. With this passion Rich leads both the product development and IT teams at LeaveWizard.

Atanas Himchev
Lead Developer & Partner
Nasko is the cool one, always coming up with the most pragmatic solutions without compromise , even in the most difficult situations.

Paul Hayward
Support Analyst
Paul is our customer champion. Nice to everyone else and unbelievably persistent with all of us to try and get our customers to a happier place, sooner.
We usually work with an additional team of freelancers and external partners, who we cannot list at present. We are however always thankful for their help and we appreciate their contribution to what we’ve built over the years.