How Productle Made Leave Management Seamless with absentify

Excel spreadsheets might work fine for budgets or to-do lists, but for managing employee leave across a growing, hybrid team? Here, things fall apart.

That was exactly the case for Productle Ltd, a digital innovation company supporting charities across the UK. Their small but dynamic team was stuck in a rigid spreadsheet that couldn't handle long-term leave planning, lacked visibility, and created constant admin friction.

Determined to find a more resilient solution, Productle explored a range of tools. But most were either too complex or trying to solve problems they didn't have. Then they discovered absentify. We spoke with Azadi Sheridan, Founder and CEO of Productle, about why switching to absentify felt like a relief, how it fit into their existing tools without disruption, and what made it a standout among countless HR solutions they've used over the years.

Before absentify, leave management at Productle lived in what CEO Azadi Sheridan described as a "beautiful spreadsheet," but one that created more problems than it solved.

The spreadsheet required manual entry, constant updating, and version tracking. It couldn't handle approvals, long-term planning, or even the basics of ensuring clarity.

"You couldn't do future stuff because you'd have only enough time to do the spreadsheet for this year," Azadi explained. This became a real issue, especially with team members who planned holidays years in advance due to volunteer work.

"One of our team, three or four years in the future, has his holidays planned to go off and do trips with kids in Nepal or Ethiopia... he was having to type his stuff into the spreadsheet, which is a real frustration."

Aside from planning issues, the system also lacked accountability and structure. Internal codes like "TH" (tentative holiday) and "H" (confirmed holiday) were used, but they were easy to miss or misinterpret.

"Like when you get a bunch of people, there's a lot of TH to H changing that takes place... You can't quickly see a snapshot of where someone is unless someone builds [a formula]," Azadi said. One small mistake in the spreadsheet could throw off an entire holiday calendar.

The lack of integration with their day-to-day tools made things worse. "Our team wasn't reassured by putting their leave information and their sick information into an Excel spreadsheet," Azadi said. "It didn't make sense for any of us."

For a company that specializes in helping charities modernize their systems, continuing to use a static, manual tool felt out of step with their mission. Even the approval process was inefficient and ambiguous.

"If someone says, 'I'm sure your manager approved something,' you'd have to go through the version history of Excel and hopefully find something," Azadi recalled. The absence of a clear, auditable trail made everything more difficult for both employees and managers.

Despite being a small company, Productle wasn't willing to accept these inefficiencies. The team decided it was time to move away from spreadsheets and invest in an intuitive tool.