home / use cases / back-office operations / holiday-planning

Holiday planning without the spreadsheet fight

An Aivell collects holiday requests by email, checks each one against your rules — notice periods, team coverage, blackout weeks, remaining balances — flags conflicts between colleagues, and prepares the schedule for a single approval. Requests, balances and the schedule stay on your systems, behind your firewall.

Watch the demo

starts when: An employee emails their holiday request to leave@

The problem

Every team has a holiday spreadsheet, and every year it starts an argument. Requests arrive in five formats — email, corridor, sticky note — balances live in a file only HR can decode, and nobody notices that both forklift drivers booked the same week until the warehouse stops. The manager becomes a part-time referee, applying rules from memory and taking the blame for every “no”.

It is classic coordination work: no judgment required for 90% of it, yet it lands on the most senior person in the room. Admin like this is a real cost — around $17,000 per employee per year across the repetitive work nobody was hired for.

How your Aivell does it

  1. Requests come in like they always did — an email to leave@, in anyone’s words. The Aivell reads it, confirms the dates it understood, and logs it.
  2. The rulebook is applied, every time. Notice periods, blackout weeks, coverage minimums, balance checks — written once in the chore, in plain language, applied without favoritism or forgetfulness.
  3. Conflicts surface immediately. Two people, same role, same week? The second requester hears about it the same day, with the free weeks listed — not in November, when the plan is printed.
  4. The schedule waits for a human yes. The Aivell assembles a conflict-checked plan and pauses. The manager reviews and approves one tidy proposal instead of adjudicating twenty threads.
  5. Approval fans out by itself. Calendars are updated, confirmations sent, balances decremented, HR’s sheet kept current.

The guardrails keep it boring in the right way: the leave plan is writable, the salary columns aren’t; employee mail is reachable, the outside world isn’t. And because the box runs its own AI onboard, who is off — and for what reason — never leaves your office.

The chore, as you'd write it.

No flowcharts, no code — a chore is just a message to your Aivell, in your own words. It shapes it into a solid, guarded procedure and follows it to the letter. This one:

Giulia Aivell · plan team holidays ● active

watch leave@ for requests; confirm what was understood

check the balance — not enough days left? reply kindly, copy HR

check the rules: two weeks notice, max two people off per team

August and year-end close are blackout weeks — flag exceptions to Petra

overlaps the same role? apply first-come, tell the second their options

update the leave plan sheet and prepare the monthly schedule

pause — Petra approves the schedule before anything is final

once approved, put the days on the team calendar and confirm to everyone

You
Got it — I'll start right away, and check with you whenever something needs a human.
Giulia Aivell

The tools it uses.

Connected with single-click passkeys — no copied tokens, no OAuth hell.

Email receives requests, confirms, nudges
Spreadsheets keeps balances and the leave plan
Calendar publishes approved time off

Sensible guardrails.

Every tool can be limited to exactly what this chore needs. For this one, you might set:

Spreadsheets Can update the leave plan and balances; the salary columns of the HR workbook are not even readable.
Email Writes only to employees on the team list and to HR; never outside the company domain.
Calendar Can create and edit "time off" entries only; other people's meetings are untouchable.

Questions, answered.

How are overlapping requests handled? +

By your rules, written in the chore — first-come wins, seniority wins, or "never fewer than two people in support". The Aivell applies them consistently, flags what the rules can't settle, and a human decides those. Nobody has to be the bad guy in the corridor.

Can employees see their remaining days? +

Yes — they just ask by replying to the confirmation, and the Aivell answers from the balance sheet. No HR portal login, no waiting for someone to check a spreadsheet on a shared drive.

Does approval stay with a human? +

Always. The Aivell prepares a clean, conflict-checked schedule and pauses; the manager approves it — from a phone, if the beach came early. Only then are calendars updated and confirmations sent.

Where does the leave data live? +

On your own spreadsheet and calendar, processed by the box inside your network. Who is off when — and why — is personal data; with onboard inference it never reaches any cloud AI service.

Related.

What is an Aivell?

An Aivell is an on-premise AI colleague: a small box that plugs into your network, runs its own AI onboard and takes the repetitive work off your desk. Prompts, documents, data — nothing ever leaves your office. Unplug the internet: it keeps working.

You describe each task as a chore, in plain language. Your Aivell turns it into a solid, guarded procedure and runs it in the background — with guardrails on every tool, a complete audit trail, and approvals in your hand when you want them. One-time setup, fixed monthly fee. No tokens, no overages.

Watch the demo

onboard inference · air-gapped · fixed monthly fee