How to Move from Excel to a Leave Tracking App

What moves and what does not

• Comes from Slack: employees (name and email). They are imported from Slack during setup; an employee list from Excel is not uploaded.
• Uploaded as CSV: birthdays and hire dates. You fill in a template downloaded from the dashboard and upload it back.
• Chosen in the dashboard: Turkish public holidays (by year) and company-specific holidays.
• Entered by hand: leave types, annual entitlement and seniority rules, and each employee’s remaining balance (as a per-person adjustment).
• Does not move: past leave records from Excel. There is no bulk import for past records or old balance movements; the old file is kept as an archive.

Prepare before you start

• Cut-over date: pick the day you stop using Excel and start using OffTracker (suggestion below).
• Employee emails: check that the emails in Excel match the emails on the Slack accounts; the birthday and hire date upload matches rows by email.
• Date list: prepare birthdays and hire dates in DD.MM.YYYY format (e.g. 31.12.1990).
• Remaining balances: each employee’s remaining leave days as of the cut-over date.
• Leave rules: annual entitlement, seniority tiers and which leave types deduct from the balance.
• People with the right roles: the Owner runs the Slack sync. The leave type, policy, holiday and birthday and hire date settings are available to an Owner or HR Admin. Only an HR Admin adjusts the remaining days. The Owner grants the HR Admin role in the “Roles & Permissions” tab, and can grant it to themselves as well.

Choose the cut-over date

Pick a clean cut-off point, such as the first day of a month or the start of the leave year. Records up to that date stay in Excel; from the cut-over date all requests are opened in OffTracker only. Do not keep records in both places in parallel, or it becomes unclear which one is right.

If approved leave runs past the cut-over date, the simplest route is for employees to request it again in OffTracker. In that case enter the remaining balance before those days are deducted, so the same leave is not deducted twice.

Migration steps

Rules for the birthday and hire date CSV

• Matching: rows are matched by email; rows with an empty email are skipped. If a row that contains a valid date has an email that does not match anyone from Slack, it is reported as “eşleşmedi” (unmatched) in the upload result and no new employee is created; rows with no date, or only an invalid date, are counted as “atlandı” (skipped).
• Empty cells: empty cells do not erase the current value; filled cells overwrite it.
• Date format: DD.MM.YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD. The order is always day, month, year; a date written month-first (US style) is either read wrongly or counted as invalid. Only dates with a wrong format or an out-of-range month or day are reported at the end of the upload as “geçersiz tarih” (invalid date); a day that does not exist in the calendar, such as 31.02.1990, is not checked separately, so check your dates before uploading.
• File: Save the CSV as UTF-8 (in Excel, the “CSV UTF-8” option); the file is read as UTF-8, so headings with Turkish characters may not be recognised in another encoding. The separator can be a semicolon or a comma and the headings in the first row are recognised; do not change the template’s headings, because the upload fails if the email column, or both date columns, are not found. The template you download is semicolon-separated and UTF-8 (with a BOM); the semicolon is the list separator in Excel with Turkish regional settings.
• Permission and language: downloading and uploading the template requires the Owner or HR Admin role. The section’s title, buttons and upload result are currently in Turkish in both interface languages.

Back to Excel: the CSV reports

Moving to OffTracker does not mean giving up Excel: when you want the data back in a spreadsheet, you can download two CSV reports from the “Export” menu on the dashboard. Only the HR Admin can use the menu. Both files are semicolon-separated and UTF-8. The column names are listed below as they appear in the file. “Leave Records (CSV)” lists all records, including cancelled ones; filter on the Durum column.

• Balances (CSV): for active employees: Çalışan, E-posta, Departman, Toplam Hak, Kullanılan, Kalan, Düzeltme.
• Leave Records (CSV): Talep No, Çalışan, İzin Türü, Başlangıç, Bitiş, Başl. Saat, Bitiş Saat, Gün, Durum, Sebep, Onaylayan, Talep Tarihi.

What to do with the old Excel file

On the cut-over date, save the final version of the file and keep it as an archive; putting the cut-over date in the file name makes it easier to find. Because OffTracker does not import old records, questions about the past ("who used how much last year?") are answered from this archive. Records after the cut-over date are kept in OffTracker and can be taken to Excel with the CSV reports.

Three common mistakes

• Not checking the emails: if an email in Excel differs from the one in Slack, the birthday and hire date row does not match; check the “eşleşmedi” (unmatched) count in the upload result.
• Entering balances before the rules: a difference entered before hire dates and policies are complete goes stale when the annual entitlement changes later. Dates and policy first, then the balance difference.
• Expecting the history to be carried over: old leave records are not uploaded to OffTracker; keep the archive and keep the cut-over date clear.