Who's Off Today? Slack and Teams Time-Off Digest

Someone on your team is out today. Do you know who? If the answer is "let me check three different places," your team has an absence-visibility problem. People plan around the wrong assumptions, work gets handed to someone who isn't even at their desk, and the question "wait, are you off?" gets asked far too late.

This is exactly the gap a Slack time-off digest closes. Instead of digging through a calendar or pinging a manager, the whole team sees who's off today right where they already work. Here's how to set it up and what else it unlocks as your team grows.

For the full request and approval flow, see time off in Slack and Microsoft Teams.

How do you see who's off today in Slack?

You post a daily digest to a Slack channel that lists everyone out that day. Once it's turned on, TimeLeaf posts it automatically at the time you set (8:00 AM by default), so the first thing your team sees each morning is who's out. No one has to ask, and no one has to remember to check.

The digest prints the person's name and whether they're out "all day" or for "part of the day" — never the leave type. It pulls from approved leave only, which means the list is accurate and not cluttered with pending requests that might still get declined, and it posts nothing on a day nobody's out.

If your team uses Microsoft Teams instead, the digest works there too, posted through a Channel Webhook. The Teams integration also posts approval and confirmation notifications, and Outlook calendar sync puts approved leave on everyone's calendar as all-day events.

Setting up the daily who's-off digest (defaults to 8:00 AM)

The digest is part of TimeLeaf's Slack and Teams integrations, available on every plan, including Starter — but it's off by default. Turn it on from the same messenger config where you set up Slack or Teams (Integrations › Messengers): tick "Post a daily 'who's out today' digest" and set a post time (8:00 AM in your company's time zone, by default). It posts to that config's own channel — the Slack row's Channel ID, or the Teams row's Channel Webhook. In Slack, invite the TimeLeaf app to the channel first, or it can't post there.

What makes the digest useful day to day:

• It only shows approved leave. The digest reflects time off that's actually locked in. A pending request reserves its days from the moment it is sent, but it is listed only once it is approved.
• It never names the leave type. A channel is read by a lot of people, and what someone's out for isn't theirs to broadcast — each line is just a name plus "all day" or "part of the day", whatever leave type it actually is.
• It posts every day, weekends included, and only when someone's out. There's no working-week model to skip against, so it checks in daily and says nothing on a day nobody is.
• It works alongside the rest of the Slack flow. Managers get interactive approve/decline DMs, employees get confirmation messages, and the digest rolls the day's approved absences into one morning summary.

If you're starting from scratch, our Slack PTO tracker setup guide walks through connecting a workspace and configuring leave types from zero. Setup for the whole platform takes under 30 minutes.

The who's-off calendar

Beyond the daily digest, TimeLeaf gives you a who's-off calendar: a month view of approved leave, on every plan. It reads the same approved-leave data as the Slack digest.

The calendar shows current absences and upcoming ones, which is where it earns its keep. The digest answers "who's off today," but the calendar answers "who's off next Thursday," the question you actually need before you commit to a deadline or schedule a launch. Each team's manager chooses whether their team sees only its own leave, the team's, or the whole company's.

If your team also runs shifts, conflict detection ties the two together. Leave that overlaps a scheduled shift gets flagged so a manager can sort it out. We go deeper on that in shift scheduling and leave management.

The calendar is part of TimeLeaf's leave management.

Does approved leave show up in Outlook?

Yes. Approved leave can post to your Outlook calendar, and each employee can also subscribe individually to a private calendar feed link from almost any calendar app. So approved time off shows up wherever your team already checks their schedule.

A few ways teams use this:

• Outlook all-day events. With the Microsoft 365 integration, approved leave posts as all-day events on Outlook calendars, shown as Out of office.
• Private calendar feed link. Each employee can subscribe their own calendar app to their own feed — it shows their leave, and teammates' only as "Out," never why.

The point of all this: the digest is the morning nudge, but the calendar sync makes absence visible everywhere your team plans, all day long.

How is this different from Slack's own out-of-office status?

Slack's native out-of-office status is something each person sets manually on themselves, and it disappears once they're back. TimeLeaf's digest is driven by approved leave in a real system of record. It's automatic, team-wide, and tied to actual balances rather than relying on everyone remembering to flip a status.

The practical differences:

• Slack status is individual and manual. It tells you one person set themselves to away. It doesn't tell you the whole team at a glance, and it won't appear if they forgot to set it.
• TimeLeaf is automatic and team-wide. Once leave is approved, the digest reflects it without anyone touching a status field.
• It's connected to balances and policies. Because TimeLeaf knows the approved leave, accruals, and leave types behind each absence, the visibility is consistent with what's actually been booked — even though the digest itself only ever says "all day" or "part of the day."

Coverage planning: spotting overlaps before they bite

Visibility isn't just nice to have. It's how you avoid being short-staffed. Seeing who's off today (and this week) lets you catch overlaps before they bite, but TimeLeaf also gives managers tools to manage the risk directly.

Two things worth knowing:

• Overlapping requests are flagged, not silently allowed. When time off would leave coverage thin, it surfaces for a manager to decide. TimeLeaf doesn't quietly approve clashes, and it doesn't hard-block them either. The call stays with a human.
• Blackout periods warn during peak times. You can mark high-demand stretches where leave is discouraged; requests during a blackout warn the employee and notify the manager, with per-employee exceptions and manager override when you need flexibility.

Together with the daily digest and shared calendar, that's a full picture: who's out now, who's out soon, and where coverage is about to get tight, all visible to the people who need to plan around it.

Getting started

If your team lives in Slack, the daily who's-off digest is one of the fastest wins you'll get from a leave tool. The Slack integration — and the digest itself, once you switch it on — are on every plan, including Starter; calendar sync is on Professional and above. The whole thing sets up in under 30 minutes.

You can browse the setup details in our documentation, or start a free trial and have the 8 AM digest running before your next standup.