As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly track staff holiday requests.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the current holiday tracker, the relevant workplace policy and the messages or forms containing staff requests.
   2. Copy the existing approved and pending holiday records into a working document, keeping each employee name, date, status and source reference.
   3. Paste the policy, records, new requests and rota context into the prompt under the matching headings.
   4. Ask the model to produce the tracker and reconciliation list, then save the result as a dated working copy.
   5. Compare every row against its original message or form and correct names, received dates, leave dates and statuses without allowing the model to fill gaps.
   6. Resolve each flagged duplicate, unclear date, missing detail or possible policy conflict with the relevant employee or decision owner.
   7. Update the organisation's actual holiday system or approved tracker yourself, then send only confirmed decisions to staff.

   Prompt

   Act as an administrative assistant helping me track staff holiday requests in the UK. I will paste requests, existing records and relevant workplace rules below. Do not approve or reject anything, infer missing dates, assume a request was received, or invent policy. Create a clear table with these columns: employee, request received, leave start, leave end, working days if explicitly supplied, status, decision owner, source reference, missing information and notes. Preserve names and dates exactly as supplied. Flag duplicate requests, overlapping requests, unclear date formats, requests that appear to conflict with the supplied rules, and any record that cannot be matched confidently to an employee. Keep a separate list of questions I need to resolve. After the table, provide a short reconciliation list showing which source items were included and which could not be matched. Treat the pasted source records as authoritative and say when they are incomplete. Do not give employment-law advice and do not decide whether leave should be approved.
   
   TEAM OR WORKPLACE RULES:
   [Paste the relevant policy or rules]
   
   EXISTING HOLIDAY RECORDS:
   [Paste the current tracker or approved leave records]
   
   NEW REQUESTS AND SOURCE MESSAGES:
   [Paste the requests, including the received date or message reference where available]
   
   TEAM OR ROTA CONTEXT:
   [Paste any relevant coverage notes or constraints]

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.