ScheduleLeave

We have learned a lot since launching ScheduleLeave, getting your brand out there is difficult, especially when competing with a market of well established solutions.

Gaining 30 happy paying clients has been a great milestone for us as a business, we aim to do so much more in the future to get ScheduleLeave into a strong market position and a recognisable brand.

It has been over a year since adding a post! We have been working hard on the product and have released a whole array of new features and functionality, most led by our clients. Here are just a few notable items:

• Changeable company year
• Bradford factor
• Approver / admin advanced reporting
• Customisable approvers for individual users
• Bulk import of leave capability
• Bulk bookings
• Support for part-time staff
• Privacy modes
• Locked dates
• User search
• Booking logs
• Customisable bank holiday systems

We have now reached an important milestone, version 1.9. Since version 1.0.0 we have added a whole bunch of features including but not limited to:

• Multiple approvers and multi-stage approval
• Advanced reporting and dashboards
• Customisable allowance and lieu on users and departments
• Slack integration
• GDPR compliance with exporting of data
• Audit logs
• Customisable work-schedules
• Employee start and end dates
• Viewing other user's calendar pages
• Filters

We have some bigger changes coming soon in 2.0 to rival other vendors on the market, stay tuned!

A new marketing site was launched to move away from the rather primitive v1 marketing site. The main driver for the new site, was the lack of quick customisability options as well as low conversion rates from clicks on Ads, due to the old site having very little content which demonstrated the full product capabilities.

We landed our first paying client from a lot of trial and error with Google ads as it was a totally new area for us. We did a lot of self-study on the marketing front so progress was slow but very much worth it when the first paying client landed. Hopefully many more to come in the future.

The MVP was built and shipped, at this point ScheduleLeave was quite basic but offered the core functionality where the product could be used, including:

• Self-sign up
• Self-administration
• Automated billing
• Approval Process – Booking, cancelling, approving and rejecting leave
• Approval Process – Highlighting leave clashes with other employees within the same department
• Approval Process – Booking leave on behalf of others you’re the approver / admin for
• Wallchart to view leave within the department / company
• Calendar page to see your leave for the entire year
• Configurable leave types
• England & Wales bank holiday support (no deduction of leave)
• Weekend support (no deduction of leave)
• Allocation / lieu configurable on a company, department and user level
• Configurable carry over leave
• Calendar integration
• Full series of help guides, searchable within the application

After discussing with the co-founder, we decided we should go into business together and build a market leading leave & absence management platform. The initial idea started off simple with a Google doc which soon got converted to multiple Trello boards and the journey started.