Introducing ALPS: annual leave planning for healthcare teams
Every practice has one: the spreadsheet. The one with the colour coding that only one person understands, the formula someone broke in March, and the quiet dread that two pharmacists have booked the same week off and nobody has noticed yet.
ALPS — the Annual Leave Planning System — is our answer to that spreadsheet. It's a simple web app that books, approves and covers leave for teams where being a person down genuinely matters: GP practices, pharmacies, clinics and other front-line services.
What makes it different
Most leave tools track requests. ALPS tracks cover. At the heart of the system are your minimum service levels — how many of each role you need on duty in the morning and the afternoon. Every leave request is checked against them, automatically:
- If the team can absorb the absence, ALPS tells the approver it's safe to say yes.
- If it can't, ALPS flags exactly which sessions would breach, and helps you arrange locum cover before you approve.
That one idea removes most of the anxiety from leave decisions. Approvers stop guessing. Staff get faster answers. And the practice stays staffed.
Built around how practices actually work
Healthcare teams don't take leave in neat eight-hour days, so ALPS doesn't either:
- Sessions, not just days. Mornings and afternoons are first-class units — for booking, for balances and for the team calendar.
- Bank holidays handled. UK bank holidays are seeded automatically, with inclusive or exclusive entitlement models and statutory top-ups calculated for you.
- Part-time friendly. Custom work schedules and pro-rata entitlements mean Tuesday–Thursday staff see accurate numbers, always.
- Locums included. Your locum pool gets its own cover portal — they see open sessions and confirm in a click, no accounts to manage.
Set up in an afternoon
Nobody has time for a six-week onboarding project. ALPS ships with bulk tools: export a setup workbook to Excel, fill in your people, roles, groups and schedules, and import it back. Most practices are live the same day.
One price, the whole system
Pricing shouldn't need a sales call. ALPS costs £69 a year for your practice — unlimited users, every feature, including everything we ship in future. That's the entire price list.
If that sounds like the leave planner your team deserves, start your subscription or get in touch for a walkthrough. We'd love to show you around.
— The ALPS Team