Approve a day off once, every calendar knows
By Lukas Winkler, CEO of SAILBAHN GmbH
A day off at SAILBAHN is approved in one place. FREIGABE makes sure every client calendar knows, so a quiet inbox never looks like we’re ignoring anyone.
Approving a day off takes one click. Getting it into the calendars where clients actually book people is the part that breaks. It depends on someone copying it into every client calendar, every time, and nobody does that reliably. Me included. Then a client books a meeting on exactly that day, or writes to you, hears nothing back, and takes the radio silence personally.
A vacation request sits in the Team calendar, the feed from your leave tool, marked Pending. FREIGABE already adds a tentative all-day blocker to each other calendar (Company, Client A, and Client B). Once the request is Approved, every blocker turns firm. Each blocker shows only "Blocker (Team)", never the event title.
The approval already knows
In most agencies a day off already exists in exactly one place you can trust: the tool where it was requested and approved. Once you have employees you probably have one anyway for time tracking. Every other copy of that day off was typed in by hand.
Let the approval do the announcing
Many of these tools can publish each person’s days off as a calendar feed, a private iCalendar (.ics) link. Paste that link into FREIGABE, put it in a sync group with the calendars your clients look at, and the approval does the announcing.
The calendar then follows the request. If the tool publishes requests that are still waiting for approval and marks them as tentative, they show up as tentative blockers. Once approved, the blocker turns firm. Rejected or withdrawn, it disappears.
What the client actually sees
A busy block, and that is enough. They can see you are away, so a quiet inbox that day reads as a day off, not as being ignored.
The blocker never copies the event’s title. It only carries the name you give the feed in FREIGABE, so call it something neutral like “Team” and the client sees no “Vacation” and no reason. Whether someone is on holiday, ill, or at a training stays inside the company.
How we run it at SAILBAHN
At SAILBAHN, absences are requested and approved in our own internal ops tool, which publishes a days-off feed for each person. Mine goes through FREIGABE into our company calendar, my private calendar, and every calendar a client has handed me. Once a day off is approved, the clients know. Nobody writes an email about it.
Two things to know
A feed is not live. FREIGABE checks it on a schedule, so an approval shows up within about 20 minutes.
The link usually contains a private token, so treat it like a password: anyone who has it can read those days off.
No leave tool? Your own calendar works too
Freelancing without a leave tool? Put the day off into any calendar in your FREIGABE sync group and it reaches the others the same way. Just mark it Busy or Out of office. Free means “you can still book me”, so in the calendars you connect with your Google or Microsoft account, FREIGABE leaves Free events alone and copies nothing.
Need the link for a calendar instead? See how to get an ICS link. Juggling several calendars anyway? Combine them into one availability. Privacy-minded? Here is what we do with your data.