From spreadsheets to one shared calendar: How Fru.pl and Vola.ro manage time off across two markets with Calamari

Behind the two brands is one international organization and that creates an interesting HR challenge. Different teams. Different markets. Different types of time off. Two companies to manage.

For a while, spreadsheets did the job. But as the organization grew, keeping time-off information scattered across separate files became increasingly difficult to manage.

Calamari gave Fru and Vola a simpler setup: two companies, managed from one account, with one place to see who’s available and who’s off.

When spreadsheets stop being enough

Before Calamari, time-off requests and other absences were tracked in spreadsheets, with separate files for different departments.

It was a familiar setup and one that worked until the number of teams, policies, and locations made it difficult to maintain.

With Fru and Vola operating across two different markets, the company needed more than a place to record vacation days. It needed a system that could handle different types of time off for different locations while keeping both companies together.

Why Fru and Vola chose Calamari

The ability to manage both companies from one account quickly became one of the key reasons for choosing Calamari.

Three things mattered most:

• managing different types of time off across different locations
• keeping Fru and Vola together in a single Calamari account
• signing in with Microsoft 365, without asking employees to create and remember another password

That last point may sound minor. In practice, it helped make Calamari easier for employees to adopt from the start.

We needed a system that could handle different types of time off across different locations and let us manage both companies – Fru and Vola – within a single account. Microsoft 365 sign-in was also important to us because it simply makes the tool easier for employees to use.

From setup to everyday use almost overnight

There was no lengthy rollout project.

Fru and Vola were able to start using Calamari almost immediately.

“The implementation was very simple and quick. We were practically up and running overnight. Today, all our employees actively use Calamari,” says Aleksandra Kulińska.

And employees noticed the difference in one of the most common HR tasks straight away: requesting time off.

No more spreadsheets. No more submitting a request and waiting for written approval from a manager. Employees could send their requests quickly, whenever they needed to.

The biggest change is how quickly employees can request time off. There’s no need to submit a request to a manager and wait for written approval anymore – now it can be done quickly, at any time.

One shared calendar for two companies

For Fru and Vola, one of the most useful changes is also one of the simplest: everyone can see who’s off.

The shared calendar gives both teams and administrators a clear view of time off across the two companies.

Instead of opening a spreadsheet or messaging someone on Teams to check whether they’re available, employees can see it at a glance.

The calendar, which is visible to both the teams and to me as an administrator, makes it much easier to check employees’ days off – both at Fru and Vola. Before we even think about sending someone a message on Teams, we can simply see that they’re off.

That visibility also helps when teams need to arrange cover. And because Fru and Vola work with different types of contracts, having the information in one system makes day-to-day team management easier.

The mobile app, notifications, and Microsoft 365 sign-in have really changed the way people request time off. We can also quickly check who is covering for whom. Calamari is a big help when managing a team working under different types of contracts.

Less admin for HR, more self-service for employees

The shared calendar solved the visibility problem, but Calamari also removed some of the smaller administrative tasks that add up over time.

HR can generate reports directly from time-off requests, instead of putting the information together manually. Calamari’s reporting functionality is specifically designed to turn HR, time-off, and attendance data into ready-to-use reports.

Employees, meanwhile, no longer need to ask HR how many vacation days they have left.

They can check their time-off balances themselves, whenever they need to.

It’s a small change for an individual employee. Across the whole company, it means fewer questions, fewer manual checks, and less back-and-forth for HR.

Was Calamari worth the investment?

For Fru and Vola, the answer is straightforward.

Calamari didn’t just replace spreadsheets. It made requesting time off faster, gave employees and administrators a shared view of availability, and made it easier to manage two companies without splitting their HR processes between separate systems.

Their advice to another company considering Calamari is equally practical: make one person responsible for knowing the system well.

We see Calamari as a very good investment that genuinely improves both the quality and speed of our work. We would definitely recommend appointing an internal Calamari “owner” – someone who knows the tool well and feels comfortable managing it.

For example, one of our benefits is an additional day off for medical check-ups, so we needed to create that rule and make it available to employees. For a company of our size, up to 60 people, having one person act as the administrator is more than enough.