Ready or not, the holiday season is upon us, and that means days off for your employees. Starting with Halloween, the fall and winter months bring appointment calendars at businesses across the northern hemisphere full of requests for days off. Halloween parties, ski trips, Thanksgiving celebrations, Christmas vacation and New Year’s plans should give your workers cause to abandon you every week until the end of 2016.

This torrent of sick days and PTO requests has caused many employers to tackle the problem head-on with online appointment scheduling, mobile time-off requests and an online approval process so that employers are not left in the lurch this holiday season.

With online appointments, employers can get a real-time view of their calendar by day, week and month, including how many people have requested days off. This should allow business owners to see when they are short-staffed and prepare for it ahead of time.

Many online appointment calendars also can be synced with e-mail and allow access to employees. Never again will your employees be able to claim they didn’t know their work schedule. This increased transparency and alert system will reduce missed shifts and increase employee accountability. When you are done creating your employee-facing calendar, online scheduling software programs allow you to take customer bookings and arrange them based on the days you have the most staff. If you are short-staffed, try to schedule appointments on days when you have more employees present. This way, you will not be unprepared to handle the busiest retail season of the year.