Leave/PTO Capacity-Impact Planner: Spot the Understaffed Week Before It Hits

The problem this kills

Leave gets approved one request at a time, in whatever calendar or HR tool happens to be handy. Each approval looks harmless on its own. Then a crunch week arrives and three of your five engineers are out, the project that was already behind has nobody on it, and the PM finds out on Monday morning instead of three weeks earlier when something could still be done about it.

The trouble is that nobody ever overlays all that leave — approved and still-requested — on top of who's actually committed to which project. The leave calendar lives in one place, the resource allocations live in a spreadsheet, and the standard hours live in someone's head. No single view answers the only question that matters: in each of the next several weeks, which teams and which projects fall below the coverage they need?

So leave conflicts surface as surprises. A delivery lead re-plans in a panic, pulls someone off another project to cover, and creates the next surprise downstream. This is a forecasting problem hiding as an HR problem, and it deserves a real, governed tool — not a heroic spreadsheet rebuilt every time someone asks for a Friday off.

What you'll build

A simple internal web app for resource managers, delivery leads, and PMs. You import your leave calendar (keeping approved and requested leave clearly separate), your people-to-project allocation list (who is committed to which project, for how many hours), and your standard weekly hours per person.

The tool overlays the leave on the allocations and computes, week by week, the coverage loss for every team and every project — how many committed hours disappear when those people are out. It flags any week that drops below the coverage threshold you set, and it shows you both the picture today (approved leave only) and the worst case (approved plus everything still requested), so you can see a conflict coming while requests are still pending and easy to move.

Before any of that becomes a "commitment" or fires an alert to a manager, a reviewer approves the impact assessment — confirming the numbers look right and deciding whether to escalate. Then you export the impact report as a clean CSV and notify the affected managers.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how leave gets requested and approved today, where your allocation list and standard hours actually live, the real column names and how people and projects are identified, your typical and peak volumes, what "enough coverage" means for your teams, and the messy exceptions (part-timers, shared people, half-day leave, contractors). It reads a short tailored spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything — so the planner matches how your teams really staff work, not a generic template.

From there it walks the agent through the data model, the leave and allocation imports, the weekly coverage-loss engine (approved vs. requested), the threshold flagging, the reviewer approval-and-escalation gate, the manager notifications, and the CSV export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's a full "No API yet?" path that uses Google Sheet / CSV imports as the data source and produces a clean CSV impact report — so you can build and run the whole thing this afternoon, with no connection to your HR or PM system required.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Leave touches people and commitments, so the controls aren't optional. The plan builds in login so only your team can use the tool, row-level security so each org only ever sees its own people and projects, a complete audit trail of who imported what and who approved which impact assessment, a hard human-approval gate so no leave request is treated as a capacity commitment and no conflict is escalated to a manager until a reviewer signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on (person + leave dates) so the same time-off entry can't be counted twice when you re-import.

Who it's for

Resource managers, delivery leads, PMs, and team leads — anyone who approves time off or staffs projects and is tired of finding out about an understaffed crunch week the morning it arrives. If you can describe how your team requests leave and who's committed to which project, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer the interview. You'll see your first weekly coverage-loss view before the afternoon's out.