Who's Off Today? Slack 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.

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. TimeLeaf sends this automatically at 8:00 AM by default, so the first thing your team sees each morning is who's on vacation, off sick, or otherwise unavailable. No one has to ask, and no one has to remember to check.

The digest matches Slack users to TimeLeaf employees by email, so the names in the channel are the real people on your team. It pulls from approved leave only, which means the list is accurate and not cluttered with pending requests that might still get declined.

If your team uses Microsoft Teams instead, the same visibility is available there too. The Teams integration 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 integration, available on the Professional plan and above. Once you connect your workspace, you pick the channel the digest posts to and you're done. The default send time is 8:00 AM, so it lands before the workday really starts.

What makes the digest useful day to day:

• It only shows approved leave. Balances in TimeLeaf are deducted on approval, not on request, so the digest reflects time off that's actually locked in.
• It covers every leave type your admin defines. That means vacation, sick, personal, parental, bereavement, jury duty, and anything else you set up.
• It works alongside the rest of the Slack flow. Managers get interactive approve/decline DMs, employees get confirmation messages, and the digest rolls all the approved results 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.

What is a team-absence channel?

A team-absence channel is a Slack channel where TimeLeaf posts time-off activity so the whole team has one place to glance at. It's optional and separate from the manager approval DMs. Think of it as the public, always-on view of who's out and who's coming back.

For UK and EU teams, this is the "who's on holiday" channel: same idea, same setup, just the terminology your team actually uses. Annual leave, holiday, time off, PTO: the channel doesn't care what you call it.

Why a shared channel beats everyone checking individually:

• No more "are you off?" surprises. Coverage gaps get noticed before they cause a problem.
• Cross-team awareness. A channel that everyone can see means another department isn't blindsided when half a team is on holiday the same week.
• Less manager overhead. People stop DMing managers to ask who's around, because the answer is already posted.

The shared team calendar: in, out, and upcoming

Beyond the daily digest, TimeLeaf gives you a shared team calendar showing who's in, who's out, and what's coming up. It's a visual layer on top of the same approved-leave data, so the Slack digest and the calendar always agree.

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. On higher plans the calendar can be org-wide, so leaders see absence across every team, not just their own.

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.

Does the team calendar sync with Google Calendar and Outlook?

Yes. The team calendar syncs with both Google Calendar and Outlook, and TimeLeaf also publishes a public iCal feed you can subscribe to 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, and you can optionally turn on automatic Out-of-Office replies.
• Google Calendar sync. Approved leave flows into Google Calendar, so it sits next to meetings and deadlines without anyone copying dates over by hand.
• Public iCal feed. Subscribe a shared calendar, a dashboard, or a personal app to the feed and it stays current automatically.

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 and absence channel are driven by approved leave in a real system of record. They're automatic, centralized, 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 and channel reflect 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.

Slack status is fine for "I'm in a meeting for an hour." For real time off across a growing team, you want a digest backed by approved leave.

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, team-absence channel, and calendar sync are all on the Professional plan and above, and 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.

Note: the Slack integration, calendar sync, shift conflict detection, and out-of-office automation are available on Professional and higher. The Starter plan covers leave tracking, the team calendar, email notifications, blackout periods, and CSV export.