Team Calendar
One accurate view of who is off, who is out, and who is in. Synced straight from Xero.
Team Calendar is the leave management and team availability platform for small businesses that run payroll in Xero. Staff request leave and flag working from home in one place; managers approve or decline, and approved leave writes back to Xero Payroll synchronously, so Xero stays the single source of truth for balances and accruals. Alongside approved leave, Team Calendar captures everyday out-of-office context (working from home, travelling, training, client site) and publishes one combined, privacy-controlled view to the calendars your team already uses: Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple Calendar.
No more finding out someone is off when they do not show up. No more leave requested by text and lost in a thread. No more double entry between a calendar and your payroll system.
The problem Team Calendar solves
On a small team, leave admin holds together until it does not. Staff flag leave inconsistently: some use a form, some send a text, some just do not. Approved annual leave sits in payroll, while "working from home" and "on a client site" live in chat threads and ad hoc calendar invites. Managers approve leave in one place, then re-key it somewhere else. The result is guesswork about who is actually available, and a payroll system that drifts out of step with reality.
Team Calendar closes the gap:
- Submit and approve in one place. Staff request leave in Team Calendar. Managers approve or decline. Approved leave writes back to Xero Payroll immediately, so balances and accruals stay correct without re-keying.
- One calendar your team can trust. Approved leave and manual out-of-office states combine into a single view, published as secure calendar feeds your team subscribes to once, then never updates by hand again.
- Privacy by default. Choose how much each feed reveals: full detail, a neutral "out of office", or a simple "busy". Sensitive leave reasons are never exposed unless an admin chooses to.
Approved leave and manual entries are published through Team Calendar's feeds. Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple Calendar fetch updates on their own polling schedules, so changes may appear later in subscribed calendars.
How it works
- Connect Xero. Team Calendar links to Australian Xero Payroll files and syncs employees, leave records, and balances on a schedule. New Zealand and United Kingdom support is planned.
- Manage leave. Staff submit leave and log manual availability. Managers approve or decline. Approved decisions write straight back to Xero.
- Publish availability. Team Calendar combines everything into a canonical view and serves it as secure, revocable ICS feeds with the privacy level you set.
- Stay informed. In-app notifications and email keep staff and managers up to date on submissions, approvals, and sync health.
Xero remains the source of truth for balances. Team Calendar never calculates accruals; it reads them from Xero and writes approved leave back synchronously.
Sync direction
| Direction | Mechanism | Scope |
|---|
| Inbound | Pull-first, scheduled Inngest jobs | Employees, leave records, leave balances. Xero provides no leave webhooks. |
| Outbound | Synchronous, user-triggered API write | AU submission stays local; approval creates scheduled leave. Imported requested leave uses approve/reject; supported remote withdrawal uses reject. No background queue. Failures surfaced inline. |
Outbound writes are synchronous; feed publication and cache rebuilds follow successful changes. Inbound Xero sync is pull-first and periodic, since Xero provides no leave webhooks. External calendar refresh timing is controlled by each calendar provider.
Xero consent requests exactly offline_access accounting.settings.read payroll.employees payroll.settings.read. One persisted full initial import covers people, leave and the complete balance roster. AU scheduled people/leave deltas use provider watermarks with a two-minute overlap; manual and nightly reconciliation are full reads. Balance polling remains provider-derived and rolling hourly.
Remote leave mutations reuse a durable UUID idempotency key for five minutes from first dispatch. Uncertain writes after that boundary require provider inspection and administrator recovery. Disconnect removes the selected remote connection before committing local teardown; failed or uncertain deletion preserves retryable state and sibling connections.
Xero calls use small shared, atomic Redis quota counters and expiring concurrency leases across serverless app, API and job workers. They enforce the five-request tenant concurrency limit and documented tenant/app quotas; lease expiry restores capacity after a worker crash. Keys initialise on first use, with no namespace bootstrap. Store failures deny calls as infrastructure failures; provider 429 responses remain separate and retain retry guidance even when their bodies are unreadable. Fixture namespaces isolate tests only.
The HTTP simplification follow-up records the retained-control requirements and current verification.
Covers everyone who affects cover, not just payroll
Team Calendar is built for the whole team, not only the people on the pay run. Employees on Xero Payroll get the two-way sync and leave balances. Contractors, directors, and advisors who never appear in payroll can still be added by hand, so their availability shows on the same calendar as everyone else, without touching a pay run. Every entry is labelled by where it came from: synced from Xero, or added manually.
Built for groups too
Team Calendar is multi-tenant by design. A small business that grows into several payroll entities (each with its own Xero file) can run them under one Account, with strict isolation between entities and role-based access for owners, admins, managers, and viewers.
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