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Absence Management

Leave Dates

UK / wider Europe Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Leave Dates Ltd · www.leavedates.com

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Leave Dates: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Leave Dates: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Leave Dates at a glance

Vendor
Leave Dates Ltd
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Starting price
“After the trial, pricing plans start from £0.75 per person, per month, with no minimum contract.” (vendor’s words) source, captured 13 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Leave Dates 1.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. Leave Dates, an absence-management product from Leave Dates Ltd, registered in England and Wales, is strongest at everyday requests and approvals — scores cluster at 6-7, crediting mobile requests, a shared colour-coded wall chart and pre-booking checks for overlaps, balances and understaffing — and weakest at regulated German sick-leave handling, at 1-2, where we found no public information on the electronic certificate of incapacity, the six-week continued-pay limit or BEM. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 1 Oct 2026 to 13 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 15 Oct 2026. all sources

Leave Dates alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Team Lead

Weighted verdict

Approves leave for twelve people across two shifts and finds out about clashes too late. Wants requests and approvals on the phone, a named substitute on every request, minimum-staffing warnings before approval, and a team calendar that shows who is away without showing why.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Team Lead

Panel median The Team Lead This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Team Lead
Entitlements & German leave rules 2 of 5 2.5 of 5
Requests, approvals & team calendar 3 of 5 3.5 of 5
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay 0.5 of 5 1 of 5
Payroll handover, time tracking & API 2 of 5 2 of 5
Health data, access & works council 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
European sovereignty 0 of 5 0 of 5
Pricing transparency 1 of 5 1 of 5

Entitlements & German leave rules

How this is scored

Whether the tool computes leave the way German and Austrian law and contracts do: entitlements per contract and working-time model, part-time proration, carry-over and expiry with the required notice, public holidays per federal state, half days and hourly leave, and special leave types.

0 — A fixed number of days per person typed in by hand; no carry-over, no proration and no public holidays.

3 — Annual entitlements and national public holidays, with carry-over as a manual adjustment and no statement on part-time or regional holidays.

5 — Entitlements per employee with automatic proration for joiners, leavers and part-time working days, public holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, half days, configurable carry-over with an expiry date, and custom leave types.

8 — Several working-time models per employee with changes over time recalculated, hourly leave, carry-over expiry with automatic notices to employees before leave lapses, special leave and parental leave types with their own rules, and entitlement changes logged.

10 — Leave law modelled and documented: entitlement rules per contract or collective agreement, statutory minimum and contractual leave kept apart where they expire differently, balances recalculated retroactively with an audit trail, and the rules a tool applies published in its help centre.

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The Team Lead

Proration is genuinely automatic — part-timers, starters and leavers are handled, allowances work in days or hours, and carry-over runs automatically with a configurable limit and an expiry date. But every rule I can find is written against UK law (the 5.6-week minimum, the 12.07% accrual rate, rolled-up holiday pay), and we found no public information on German federal-state public holidays, half days, or keeping statutory and contractual leave apart where they expire differently. 2 3 6 7

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Requests, approvals & team calendar

How this is scored

The everyday flow: an employee requests leave on a phone, the right person approves, a substitute is named, and the team can plan around it — judged on configurable approval chains and on what colleagues are allowed to see.

0 — Leave requested by email or in a shared calendar; no approval step and no record of who approved.

3 — Requests with a single approver and a team calendar, but no substitutes, no blocking rules and every absence reason visible to everyone.

5 — Mobile requests and approvals, approvers per team or department, substitutes named on the request, a team calendar that shows absence without the reason, email or push notifications, and calendar sync.

8 — Multi-level approval chains, minimum staffing rules or blackout periods, delegation while the approver is away, configurable calendar visibility per role, Microsoft Teams or Slack integration, and every request, approval and cancellation logged.

10 — Approval logic that matches a real organisation: rules per location, team and leave type, conflicts checked against staffing and shift plans before approval, a complete history per request, and reporting on pending and overdue approvals.

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The Team Lead

This is what I would live in: requests and approvals on the phone, a shared wall chart that updates the moment someone requests, and — the thing I actually need — checks for team leave limits exceeded or understaffing run before a booking goes through, with overlaps highlighted to the approver. Slack and email notifications, calendar sync and audit trails are all evidenced; what I found no public information on is a named substitute on each request ("handovers" appears once as a word in the feature list), multi-level approval chains, and delegation while an approver is away. 2 3 8 9

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Sick leave, eAU & continued pay

How this is scored

Sick notifications and the German electronic certificate of incapacity: whether the tool retrieves the eAU from the health insurer itself or through a named payroll system, how sick days are counted towards the six-week continued-pay and BEM thresholds, and how child-sick days and certificates from private insurance are handled.

0 — Sickness recorded as another leave type with no word on the eAU, certificates or thresholds.

3 — A sick-leave type with a document upload, and "eAU" mentioned without saying who retrieves it or how.

5 — Sick notification by the employee in the app, the eAU retrieval process documented — by the tool itself or via a named payroll system — with the retrieval status visible to HR, and child-sick days as a separate type.

8 — eAU retrieval from the statutory health insurers documented end to end with the certified software named, retrieval results written back to the absence, sick days counted towards the six-week continued-pay limit per illness, BEM thresholds flagged to HR only, and paper certificates for privately insured employees handled.

10 — Sick leave handled as the regulated process it is: eAU retrieval automated with error and follow-up handling, continued-pay and sickness-benefit transitions tracked, BEM invitation workflow supported, reasons and documents restricted to named roles, and the whole process documented in the help centre.

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The Team Lead

Sickness is a tracked leave type with its own policy and there is general document storage for absence records, but we found no public information on the eAU, on who retrieves certificates, or on counting sick days towards the six-week continued-pay or BEM thresholds. The only statutory sick rule evidenced is the UK long-term-sick carry-over of up to four weeks, which is not the German process. 3 6 8

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Payroll handover, time tracking & API

How this is scored

Getting absences into the payroll run with the right codes and keeping balances consistent with time tracking: exports or integrations for the payroll systems German companies use, time-account interaction, and an API.

0 — No export beyond a screen list; absences are retyped into payroll.

3 — A CSV or Excel export of absences per month, with no named payroll system and no API.

5 — A documented export or integration for DATEV (LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt) or another named German payroll system, absence types mapped to payroll codes, and a documented API.

8 — Several named payroll integrations, absence and overtime balances shared with time tracking, configurable payroll codes per leave type, monthly closing that locks past periods, webhooks, and an API with published limits.

10 — Payroll handover that closes the month: absences, sick days and eAU results delivered to payroll in its own format with corrections flagged, a period lock with an audit trail, a versioned API with a deprecation policy, and the full absence history exportable at contract end.

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The Team Lead

Excel export of absences sits in every plan, an API plus webhooks and Zapier sit higher up, and TOIL accrual feeds straight into the leave allowance — so absences are not retyped by hand. But we found no public information on any named payroll system such as DATEV, on mapping leave types to payroll codes, or on a period lock for monthly closing. 2 6 8

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Health data, access & works council

How this is scored

What the tool does with data that is health data in law: who can see a sickness reason or certificate, how long absence records are kept, whether access is logged, and whether the vendor documents what a works agreement on absence recording needs.

0 — Nothing stated about who sees sick data or how long absences are kept.

3 — Roles for employees, managers and admins, but sickness reasons and documents visible to managers by default, and no retention setting.

5 — Sick-leave reasons and certificates restricted to HR by configurable permissions, colleagues see only "absent", retention or deletion of absence records configurable, and a DPA available.

8 — Field-level permissions per leave type, access to health-related records logged, retention rules per record type with automatic deletion, employees able to see their own records, and documentation aimed at works councils or a works agreement.

10 — Health data governed and evidenced: Art. 9 GDPR processing explained per feature, deletion runs logged and reportable, audit logs exportable, no analytics or AI features run on sickness data without explicit configuration, and the vendor publishing a template or checklist for the works agreement.

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The Team Lead

Role-based access, audit trails and privacy options over what colleagues can see are stated, which is the baseline I need before putting a team calendar on the wall. But we found no public information on retention or deletion settings for absence records, on permissions per leave type, on a data processing agreement, or on anything aimed at a works council — and the terms allow the supplier to use aggregated, anonymised absence data for benchmarking and analytics. 3 5 8 1

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where absence and sickness data lives, who the contracting entity is, and who the subprocessors are — including email, push-notification and support providers. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated, and subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — email, push notifications, analytics or support — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published with locations, and a DPA that covers sickness data as special-category processing.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, and certification published.

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The Team Lead

The contracting entity is Leave Dates Ltd, registered in England and Wales — outside the EU — and the captured pages leave the hosting location and every subprocessor unnamed, including email and push notifications. A UK and EU-based support team is mentioned, but that is support staffing, not where the data sits; we found no public information on data residency, EU hosting, or certification. 3 5

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Pricing transparency

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the real annual cost from public pages alone: price per employee or per user, which features (eAU, payroll export, time tracking) sit in which tier, minimum users and the minimum term.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A starting price exists, but the pricing basis or which features it covers is unstated — the invoice is unknowable.

5 — Tier prices public with the pricing basis given, but at least one commonly needed piece (eAU, payroll export, time tracking, extra admins) is unpriced or "on request".

8 — Every tier priced publicly with its basis, add-on prices listed, minimum users, minimum term and VAT treatment given.

10 — Complete price computability: the annual invoice derivable for a given headcount and feature set, with every add-on, setup fee and overage published.

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The Team Lead

The pricing pages do show named tiers with which features sit where — calendar sync and TOIL lower down, SSO and the API higher up — and VAT receipts are emailed and saved. But we found no public information on price figures, the pricing basis, minimum users or the minimum term, so I cannot compute what a twelve-person team would actually pay per year. 2

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Questions about Leave Dates

Is Leave Dates European?

Yes, though not from the EU. whats-best.ai classifies Leave Dates as UK / wider Europe.

Where does Leave Dates store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

Does Leave Dates have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Leave Dates?

As of 15 Oct 2026, the panel rates Kenjo (3/5), flair (2.5/5) and HRlab (2.5/5) highest among the other 16 Absence Management products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is Kenjo (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Leave Dates alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (9)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 +1 earlier capture: 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing page www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Absence management www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Privacy policy www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Terms of service www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Entitlements & German leave rules — found from sitemap www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Entitlements & German leave rules — found from sitemap www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Requests, approvals & team calendar — found from sitemap www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Requests, approvals & team calendar — found from sitemap www.leavedates.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →