By Steve Niles
This month, I decided to spotlight FedSoft's Vacation Tracker at http://www.fedsoft.com/vactrac.html. At most jobs, we only get a set amount of vacation time. It's often important to plan it out in advance so that, for example, you don't wind up working Christmas Eve because you blew all your leave going to monster truck rallies in August.
Vacation Tracker is designed to help you maximize your vacation time with a year-view holiday and leave calendar, a holiday/leave database, and an accumulated leave calculator. Leave data can also be exported to your Date Book.
Just when exactly is President's Day, and does it mean a three-day weekend for you? The Vacation Calendar is designed to help you plan your vacations in order to best take advantage of weekends and holidays. You can go through and mark down all your leave, sick leave, and holiday time so that you can view your past and future time off. The Vacation Calendar is pictured in Figure A.
FIGURE A
The Vacation Calendar should help you take advantage of weekends and holidays.
If you're as unaware of the calendar as I am, sometimes the only way to tell when another holiday is approaching is to notice the cycle of cheesy decorations that adorn Dot's cubical down the hall. Plastic fall foliage and jack-o-lanterns? Halloween is coming. Cornucopias and Pilgrim hats? Looks like Thanksgiving. Garland and wreathes? Yep. Arbor Day.
By then, though, it may be too late to request time off, as Dot has already edged you out in order to spend two weeks with her grandparents and their incontinent Irish terrier, Mr. Buckingham, in Boca Raton.
However, you can get advanced warning on upcoming holidays with the Holiday and Leave Database. It will let you organize information about your leave and sick leave, and it will work with the Vacation Calendar to manage your leave time. Meanwhile, the included Leave Calculator is designed to let you calculate how much leave you have and how much you'll earn.
FedForm's Vacation Tracker is priced at $10.00, but you can download a 190K demo version first before you commit yourself.
