Every workplace, whether small or corporate size, has holidays, sick leave, personal days, or some type of paid time off (PTO). Relying on a system of sticky notes and old chat messages, however, is not the best way to keep track of each team member’s availability. You need an organized PTO calendar managed through online forms, where all PTO requests are timestamped, archived, and signed in one place where they can’t get lost or forgotten.
How to Make Your Own PTO Request Form
We’ll show you step-by-step how to make your own PTO request form with Paprlss in a few minutes.
Navigate to Manage Documents and click on the first toolbar icon to create a Document.
The first thing to do is to choose the document type you want to create.
In this case, we are making a PTO request form, so the most fitting document type to choose is Form.
Select Form and type in the title, “PTO Request Form”.
Tip: Toggle "Add to dashboard's forms pie chart?" to view statistics on this form in the homepage.
The next section you see is for permissions.
Manage who has access to submit, view, edit, and delete each PTO Request Form submission.
Tip: Go to Manage Team to create team roles to help manage consistent permissions throughout the app.
Remember you can change these permissions at any time.
In this scenario, we want to allow any team member to submit a PTO Request Form.
Select “Any”
You determine who has viewing and editing rights. In this case, we’ll select the team admin and the creator themselves, enabling them to view their submissions and make adjustments to them if needed. You can also grant viewing access to supervisors or other managers.
The same applies for deleting permission. The requester might want to revoke his or her PTO request, so you can enable them to delete their form.
Now that we figured out the access rights, we can start adding the form fields.
Click on the icon at the top right corner to open the available field types’ side menu.
Tip: Fields can be added to the form in any order and any amount of times, and they can be updated at any point by a team admin.
Start by selecting a "Date / Time" field.
A window will open to configure the selected field.
Add a descriptive label, such as “Dates Requested” and mark this as a required field.
Continue configuring the field by pressing on the arrow.
In Step 3, we have “Date / Time Options”. Since this is a PTO request form, the user may need to submit a single day or a range of days, so under "Type" select Date Range from the drop-down menu.
Tip: Set a minimum date as today to simplify the selection for the user, then set a maximum date if you want to restrict requesting time off longer than n-period of time.
In Step 4, review the field details to confirm they are correct and press Save. This will close the Field Options dialog.
Observe the Dates Requested field showing up in the Fields box.
To add another field, click on the top right icon again. This time choose Select List as your field type.
Fill out the field options, and key in “Type” as the field label.
When you get to Step 3, “Select List Options”, choose “Custom” under type.
Tip: Toggle autocomplete when the select list has a large number of options to help the user find his or her desired selection.
Select Lists enable you to preview the field exactly as it will appear on the form.
Type in the menu options you want to include in the space below.
Press “Enter” on your keyboard to add a new option.
Now you can view the drop-down menu.
Finish the field configuration by pressing Save.
Let’s add a second select list field type. You’ll see what it is for in Step 3.
Type in “Full Name” as the field label and toggle “Required Field?” on.
In Step 2 (display), let’s change the field icon to match the label. Select the person icon.
Tip: Enter “100” as the field width percentage. This will help organize the form.
Step 3. Select List Options
We were just here with our previous field, but now we will choose “Team Users” as the option.
Click to enable autocomplete.
Notice the field preview and text area are gone when selecting team users.
This option means the users will see a complete list of all current team members’ full names sorted by last name. Here, the user submitting the form can select himself or herself. This will associate the user id with the completed form, which will come in handy for team admins down the line.
Review the settings for this field and save.
Let’s go back to the available field types and this time add a multi-line text field.
In the field options window, type in “Additional Comments” as the field label. This field does not need to be marked as required.
Under step 3, Multi-Line Text Options, configure this text area to match your preferences.
Tips
- Enable Spell Check to help the user fix any typos.
- Permit Resizing to let the user make the text box as tall or short as needed.
- Set a maximum character count to keep the comments from becoming long paragraphs.
Review the field options are correct and press Save to continue adding fields to the document.
We are almost done with our form, but we still want to add a few more fields.
Click on the top right icon to add a new field. Select checkbox field type.
Enter “Special Cases” as the field label and click on the arrow to continue.
In this case, the field doesn’t need an icon so let’s remove it and continue.
For checkbox options, let’s add some special cases that might exempt a team member from spending PTO. Include anything that applies to your business. Then save.
Go back to the available field types and select the Draw / Sign type.
Enter “Manager Signature” as the field label. You can see where we’re headed with this field. We want to have a signature space for the supervisor approving the PTO request.
Set the height of the signature box, the pen width, and choose any pen color in Step 3 Drawing/Signature Options. Finish by clicking Save to add the field to the form.
All the fields the form needed have been added, so we’re ready to save our work. But first, let’s preview it.
Click Preview on the bottom left.
A window will open with an empty version of this form.
Use the preview to adjust any field widths, order, labels, or icons.
In this case, the form looks good, but the signature box seems to be too big. Let’s fix that.
Close out of the preview by pressing Cancel.
Hover over the signature field on the menu icon. Clicking this opens the field options window.
Adjust the field width (in Step 2 "Display") and height (in Step 3) to fit the form better. Then press Save.
Finishing touches
The form is done! But visually, you want to create a division between the PTO request fields and the manager signature. This can be achieved with two clicks.
Select the Spacer field type in the list of available fields.
Notice the "Insert After Field" dropdown menu.
Tips
- You can skip the configuration in the field options window and immediately press Save. The default settings the Spacer field comes with is 100% width — think of it as an invisible line.
- In Step 2 Display, notice under the field width there is a drop-down menu named “Insert After Field”. Use this to insert the field you are adding anywhere in the form when you know where you want this field to go, if not at the bottom. This is a shortcut to the drag-and-drop step.
After saving your changes, your document is ready to start getting filled out!
Let’s see what the final form looks like. Click to preview and start filling out the form.
Tip: Forms can’t be submitted in preview mode; this is for admin purposes only.
Start by searching for your name in the team users’ select field. We enabled autocomplete, so this will pull up any matching results. It will look like this.
Click on the field “Type” to select from the menu options, then move on to select the date range to request (it can be one day as well).
Finish with the rest of the fields, and you’re done.
That is what your PTO Request Form looks like.
