Your team
Requests
Dates look like 2026-07-06 or 7/6/2026. Both ends are days off. Put your own policy (seniority, who asked first, who had the last holiday) into the priority column. Lines starting with # are ignored.
Enter your team, the requests and your minimums, then click the button.
Result
Decision for every request
| Person | Dates | Days off | Priority | Decision | Why, and what would work |
|---|
Against first come, first served
What you get by going through the requests in the order you listed them and approving each one that still fits.
| Plan | Requests approved | Working days off | Priority score |
|---|
Cover on every day someone is off
Highlighted rows are days where a role is down to exactly its minimum.
| Day | Off | On duty by role |
|---|
How it is calculated
Hard rules (never broken): on every working day, the people on duty in each role stay at or above the minimum you gave (so at most headcount − minimum can be off); the total off on one day stays at or under your cap; nobody is approved off on a blackout date; one person is never counted off twice on the same day. Days outside the working days you listed never use cover. Objective: maximise the sum over approved requests of priority (times working days off, if you chose days), with ties going to more approvals and then to the request listed first. Search: an exact branch-and-bound over every combination of requests, started from the first-come, first-served answer and pruned by the best possible remaining weight, so on the sizes this page accepts the plan is the best for the rule you chose. If a very large set hits the search limit the page says so. The tests compare it with a brute-force search of every subset on random problems.
Not modelled: statutory or contractual leave rights, notice periods, accrued balances and carry-over, sick leave, part-time and shift patterns inside a working day, skills beyond a single role per person, and people who can cover two roles. Unverified: checked against exhaustive search and invented data in unit tests, not against a real workplace's policy or a leave law.
Common questions
How do I decide which vacation requests to approve when too many people ask for the same week?
List each request with its dates and how much it matters, say how many people each role needs on duty, and approve the set that never drops a role below that number on any working day. Do it by priority first, then by how many requests or days off you can say yes to. This tool searches every combination and shows the plan, and for each request it cannot approve, the day it breaks the rule and who is already off.
Is first come, first served the fairest way to approve time off?
It is simple and easy to defend, but it can be wasteful: one early request for three weeks can block three people who each wanted a few days in the same stretch. The planner shows what first come, first served would approve next to the best plan so you can see what the rule costs, and then you choose the rule you want to run by.
How does the planner choose between requests that cannot all be approved?
Every request has a priority from 1 to 5 (3 if you leave it blank). The plan maximises priority-weighted requests, or priority-weighted days off if you pick that, and breaks ties toward more approvals and then toward the request listed first. It is an exact search, so on up to about forty competing requests it is proven best for the rule you chose. Put your own seniority or first-come order into the priority column if that is your policy.
What counts as minimum cover?
For each role you give the least number of people who must be at work on every working day. If you have four baristas and need two on duty, at most two can be off at once. You can also cap the total number of people off per day across the whole team, and mark blackout dates such as a holiday weekend or stocktake when nobody is off.
What if a request is denied?
The tool gives the first working day that breaks the cover rule, names the approved people already off that day, and suggests the nearest window of the same length, up to six weeks either side, that would fit the approved plan. That turns a flat no into an offer of different dates.
Does this follow my local leave law or contract?
No. It does not know statutory leave, notice periods, accrual balances, carry-over, unpaid leave rules, union agreements or any rule about who must be granted leave. It only checks the cover rules you type in. Check the plan against the rules that apply to you before telling anyone.
Is my team list uploaded anywhere?
No. Names, roles and dates are read and solved in this browser tab. Nothing is sent to a server, there are no accounts or cookies, and the tool does not store your plan. It works offline once the page has loaded.