We believe the time saving per employee is the ultimate measure of how good a leave system is.
We have used our experience of working with our existing customers and the large amounts of real-world data we have accumulated over the years to come up with the numbers behind the return on investment example below.
The table displays how much time per employee per year is being spent for each activity when using a paper-based or Excel+Email system and when using LeaveWizard.

Time spent is in minutes per employee per year unless specified otherwise.
85% reduction in time spent if using LeaveWizard
62% when Emergency cover is included
~10 hours saved per employee per year
How it’s calculated
Requesting leave – The average number of holiday requests per year is 7. Requesting leave takes 3 minutes on average if using paper or Excel + Email solution and no more than 30 seconds if using LeaveWizard.
Approving leave – The average number of holiday requests per year is 7. Approving leave takes 5 minutes on average when using paper or Excel + Email solution and no more than a minute when using LeaveWizard.
Recording sickness – The average number of absences per year is 4. Recording absence takes 4 minutes on average when using paper or Excel + Email solution and no more than a minute when using LeaveWizard.
Finding information – This refers to finding out who else is on leave, or finding out if someone else has booked a specific date. We think it takes about 10 minutes per request if using paper or Excel + Email solution and no more than 2 minutes when using LeaveWizard.
Producing reports – We’ve had to use an example 20 employees company to baseline this metric. In our experience it takes at least 2 hours per month to produce reports for 20 person company if using paper or Excel + Email solution. With LeaveWizard producing reports takes no more than 12 minutes per month.
Cost of emergency temp cover – This occurs when people are unexpectedly absent. It could be either due to sickness or due to key people booking leave at the same time. This is very difficult to measure so we have used some real world numbers and have made some assumptions. The average number of sick days is 1.5. We anticipate that per employee there’s additional 0.5 days per year of emergency cover. Due to its ability to restrict leave or absence in various scenarios and the visibility it provides we expect that LeaveWizard would at least half the wasted time.