Toil Vs Overtime Pay: An Honest Comparison

Why teams start looking

People rarely switch leave tools because of a missing feature. They switch because of a specific, repeated friction — and it is worth naming yours before you evaluate anything, because it determines which differences actually matter.

The common triggers: the price stepped up at renewal; the team grew past the point where a simple list works and nobody can see coverage; approvals are slow because managers will not log in; or the tool handles part-time and irregular patterns badly enough that HR maintains a private correcting spreadsheet.

That last one is the strongest signal. A shadow spreadsheet means the system of record is not the system of record.

A worked example: when the second approval breaks cover

A support team of six covers Monday to Friday. The team’s own rule is that four people must be on shift for the queue to stay inside its response target.

In the last week of July, two people book the same Thursday and Friday. Both requests are individually reasonable — both have the days available, neither is on a critical deadline — and both get approved on the day they are submitted, by two different managers who each see only their own direct report.

That leaves four on shift, which meets the rule exactly. Then someone calls in sick on the Thursday morning. The team is now at three, below the threshold, on the day it least wants to be.

Nothing in that sequence was a mistake by any individual. The failure is structural: the second approval was made without visibility of the first, so the decision that broke cover looked identical to the one that did not.

The fix is not a stricter policy. It is showing the approver, at the moment of the decision, who else is already off on those exact dates. LeaveKit does this at booking time — the request itself surfaces the clash before it reaches an approver, so the person submitting it can often self-correct by moving a day. Handling it before approval is cheaper than handling it after.

How to compare fairly

Vendor comparison tables — including any published by us — are marketing. They are built by choosing rows where the author wins. Use them for a shortlist and nothing more.

Compare on your own workflow instead. Write down the five things your team does most often with leave, in your own words, and time each one in each candidate during a trial. "Book a half-day on a Friday", "approve while on a phone call", "check July coverage for the support team", "correct a booking after approval", "export last quarter for payroll".

Five real tasks, timed, beats forty feature checkboxes. And it surfaces the differences that a feature table cannot express — the ones that come from how a tool is shaped rather than what it contains.

The differences that survive a trial

Once you strip out the features neither team will use, most leave tools differ on four things.

How coverage is presented. Some show a list of who is off; some show a chart you can read at a glance. The difference sounds cosmetic and is not — a list requires you to already know what you are looking for, a chart shows you the week you had not thought to check.

Where the decision happens. If approval requires a desktop login, approvals are slow. If it happens from a phone notification, they are not.

How the tool handles the irregular case. Every tool handles a five-day-a-week employee. Ask how it handles someone on compressed hours, and watch whether the answer involves a workaround.

What happens after approval. Corrections, cancellations and sickness conversions are routine, and tools vary enormously in whether these are first-class actions or destructive edits that erase the history.

What switching actually involves

The migration itself is usually small: employees, allowances, leave types, and any leave already booked for the rest of the year. What people underestimate is the balance reconciliation.

Your current balances are the product of a year of edits, corrections and one-off agreements. Some of them are wrong, and moving systems is when you find out. Budget an afternoon to check every balance against the underlying bookings before you cut over, and treat any discrepancy as a conversation with that employee rather than a silent correction.

Two other things worth planning: pick a cutover date that is not mid-peak-season, and keep the old system readable for a full leave year afterwards for historical questions. Note that historical import is a genuine gap in many tools, LeaveKit included — it does not import historical leave data today, so plan for the old system to remain your archive.

Where LeaveKit fits

LeaveKit is a leave management tool for UK teams of roughly 5 to 50 employees, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do.

What it does: month, week, 30-day and day views with department filter, hover detail cards, holiday and birthday markers; date range with half-day start/end and live working-day calculation; and — the part that motivated it — warns at booking time when teammates are already off on the same dates (/api/leave/conflicts). It also handles overtime entry logging at /toil, converts logged hours into toil balance, CSV reporting, an iCal subscription feed, and public holiday calendars for 11 countries with the UK dates checked against gov.uk for 2026 to 2028.

What it does not do, stated plainly because buying decisions are made on the gaps: there is no Slack integration, no two-way Google or Outlook calendar sync (the iCal feed is one-way), no payroll or Xero connector, no public API, and no SSO. The mobile app is built but not yet released. If any of those are requirements today, LeaveKit is not the right tool for you yet.

Commercially, LeaveKit is in early access with a 30-day free trial and no card required. Public pricing is not published yet. You can also open the demo workspace without signing up at all, which is the fastest way to judge whether the wall chart matches how your team actually thinks about coverage.

Frequently asked questions

How much holiday are UK employees legally entitled to?

The statutory minimum is 5.6 weeks of paid holiday per leave year, according to gov.uk holiday entitlement guidance. For someone working five days a week that is 28 days, and employers are permitted to count the eight UK bank holidays within that total rather than in addition to it. Part-time employees get 5.6 weeks of their own working week: three days a week gives 16.8 days. The contract must state whether bank holidays are included.

Can an employer refuse a holiday request?

Yes, an employer can decline a specific request, subject to notice requirements. What an employer cannot do is operate in a way that prevents someone taking their statutory entitlement at all. In practice, a refusal is far easier to defend when it comes with a concrete reason — a stated minimum cover level for that team on those dates — than when it is attributed to unspecified operational requirements. Acas publishes guidance on handling refusals.

What happens to holiday that has not been taken by the end of the leave year?

That depends on your policy and on which part of the entitlement is involved. Of the 5.6 weeks, 1.6 weeks can generally be restricted more tightly, while the four-week portion carries stronger protections — particularly where someone was prevented from taking it through sickness or because they were never given a real opportunity. Set a carry-over cap in policy, and run a balance check in the third quarter rather than in December.

Is LeaveKit free?

LeaveKit is in early access with a 30-day free trial and no card required. There is no permanent free tier and public pricing has not been announced yet. The trial is the full product: wall chart, booking with half-days, conflict warnings, approvals, TOIL logging, CSV reports and public holiday calendars. There is also a demo workspace at /demo that needs no sign-up at all.

Does LeaveKit integrate with Slack or sync with Google Calendar?

No Slack integration exists today, and calendar support is a one-way iCal subscription feed rather than two-way sync — leave appears in Google Calendar or Outlook, but changes made there do not flow back. There is also no payroll connector, no public API and no SSO at present. If any of those are firm requirements, LeaveKit is not the right fit yet, and it is better to know that before a trial than during one.

Try it on a real month

The fastest way to judge any leave tool is to run one real month through it. LeaveKit has a demo workspace that needs no sign-up, and a 30-day trial with no card required.

Open the demo workspace · Start a 30-day trial