Lav Crnobrnja and Slobodan Stojanovic are the co-founders of Vacation Trackeran application that allows you to properly manage employees’ vacation and sick leave.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
Who ?
The first works from Quebec and the second from Serbia. “I lead the marketing team and Slobodan, the technical team there. »
The product
The idea for such an application was born out of the fact that in North America the number of paid vacations and sick days was low compared to many countries. “We are lagging behind here, notes Lav Crnobrnja. As we have customers in more than 100 countries, we can compare. »
More directly, he wanted to give substance to it following an internal vacation management problem. “It’s easy to do it when there are five employees,” says Lav Crnobrnja. But when we grew to 25 employees, we started tearing our hair out. »
The basics of Vacation Tracker were thrown at a hackathon. While he could only rely on a draft, people reached out to Lav Crnobrnja to find out when the product would launch. A first version was in 2018, then it was improved and inflated with features over the months and user comments. “Reid Hoffman, creator of the LinkedIn social network, once said, ‘If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of a product, you’ve launched it too late.’ Our first version was very pocket-sized! »
IMAGE FROM VACATION TRACKER WEBSITE
One of the features of Vacation Tracker is to have an overview of the holidays within a team.
The purpose of the application is to automate the management of vacations, sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave in the company. “A lot of people use paper, pencil and Excel files,” says Lav Crnobrnja. Managing manually takes time. With Vacation Tracker, you can save four to five hours a month. When you have product delivery dates for a client, it’s handy to know who will be there or not on the team. It is possible to receive notifications one week before the departure of an employee. This can be managed by department or for the whole company. »
innovation
App information can be integrated into software such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. “We use a lot of tools at work. You have to remember passwords and usernames every time, explains Lav Crnobrnja. Especially since we don’t use Vacation Tracker only four or five times a year. There, 90% of people can handle everything from the software they work in. No need to plug in anywhere else. »
If all goes well, Vacation Tracker will soon make it possible to analyze the data collected over the past four years, in order to be able to warn, among other things, the management of periods when there are more absences.
“Be careful if you have a deadline soon, because usually there are fewer people at this time of year”, gives as an example Lav Crnobrnja. “We want to be useful for those who manage. »
The future
To date, executives have invested more than $1.1 million in the development of Vacation Tracker. And this without external funding. “We like to be able to make our decisions, not have anything imposed on us, explains Lav Crnobrnja. The goal with external investments is to become first or second in its market. This is not what we want. We want to have a profitable business without more, to be a good player in the market, with a good corporate culture. I feel freer that way. »
Today, Vacation Tracker has 1,400 customers (and 100,000 users per month) such as IBM, Nike, Bell Canada, banks and schools, among others. “The majority of customers are techno, but we also have churches! launches Lav Crnobrnja. I do not know why. »
He now wants a multilingual platform. A French version should be operational by mid-May. Then comes the one in Spanish. “We also want to integrate with the systems already in place in companies’ human resources departments. »