Holiday Booking for Security Guards

A guard messages you on a Sunday to ask for next month off. You say yes, then forget to write it down anywhere except your own memory, and three weeks later you're building the rota and you've scheduled them on the same week.

What most firms do today

A holiday request is a text message, a verbal "yeah that's fine", or a name scrawled in the margin of a wall planner. Nothing tracks how many days someone's already taken this year, so working it out means asking the guard, or going back through old rotas by hand.

How TacDesk handles holiday and time off

Guards request from their phone. From the app, a guard picks a request type: Holiday, which uses their holiday allowance, or Other Time Off, for things like a sick day or an appointment, which doesn't touch their holiday balance. They pick the dates and add a reason, and the request goes to management as pending.

Managers approve or decline. A manager sees the request with the guard's name, the dates, the reason and their current balance, and approves or declines it. The guard gets a notification either way. Approving a holiday request deducts the days used from that guard's balance automatically; declining leaves the balance untouched. A senior manager can later cancel an approved holiday if plans change, which refunds the days back to the guard.

Two ways to run the allowance. Most firms run allocation mode: each guard gets a fixed number of days a year (28 by default, adjustable per firm), set against a reset date you choose. A manager can add bonus days for a specific guard, or manually adjust a balance up or down with a reason recorded against it. For guards paid on hours worked rather than a fixed schedule, TacDesk can run accrual mode instead: holiday builds up as a percentage of hours worked in a rolling 12-month window, recalculated daily.

Contractors are excluded. Guards recorded as contractors or sub-contractors, rather than PAYE, don't accrue or get offered statutory holiday through TacDesk, reflecting that genuinely self-employed contractors sit outside statutory holiday entitlement.

Bank holidays are built in. TacDesk pulls the official list of England and Wales bank holidays and can apply separate pay-rate and client charge-rate multipliers for shifts worked on one.

Why it matters

You stop relying on memory. A holiday agreed by text message is easy to lose track of. A request that lives in the system, with a balance attached, isn't.

Double-booking a guard's own holiday gets harder. Approved leave is visible against the same records you use to build the rota, rather than sitting in a separate conversation.

The statutory baseline is there if you want it. UK workers are entitled to a minimum of 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year, which works out to 28 days for someone on a standard five-day week (gov.uk). TacDesk's default allowance is 28 days, and its accrual mode uses the 12.07% figure gov.uk sets out for calculating leave from hours worked (5.6 weeks against a 46.4-week working year), for guards whose hours vary. Whether that's the right allowance for a particular guard's contract is still your call; TacDesk gives you the tools to run whichever number you set.

Where it sits

Holiday and time-off requests are bundled with Rota & Scheduling, so they're on every plan, TacFree included. See Rota & scheduling for how the rota itself is built, and Security guard scheduling software for the fuller picture of TacDesk's scheduling tools. If you're covering a guard's approved leave with a spare pair of hands, the shift marketplace is where that gets posted (TacStarter and above).

Start free to run holiday requests through TacDesk, or book a demo to see it alongside the rest of the rota.