There are two ways of exporting absence from Hrvey into a calendar - via the direct Google Calendar integration that is part of our Google Workspaces integration, or by subscribing to a ‘calendar feed’ that Google Calendar will then periodically check for updates. This guide shows you the latter, how to subscribe to a calendar feed in Google Calendar.

Where can I find the calendar feeds?

You can find these one the dashboard, the first page after you log in, by clicking the ‘Calendar Feeds’ link on the righthand side.

How do I subscribe to the calendar feed?

You’ll see a list of calendar feeds that you can import. There is one for your whole organization, and one for each individual team and office. You can import one or more of these, to get the combination of users you want to know about absence for.

On the righthand side is a subscribe button. If you click it, your browser will launch the default calendar for your computer. If you’ve set this up to be Google Calendar, then all you should need to do now is to confirm that you want to subscribe to the feed. If you haven’t set that up, your browser will likely open Outlook, Apple Calendar or a similar calendar app - if you’re not using these, then that’s probably not what you want, and you’ll have to import the calendar feed in Google Calendar in a different way:

If you open Google Calendar, then on the lefthand side, at the bottom, is a section called ‘Other Calendars’. Next to that title is a + icon - if you click this, you get a dropdown - near the bottom, select ‘From URL’. Now copy one of the calendar feed urls from Hrvey, and paste it in the dialog in Google Calendar. Congratulations, you’ve imported absence from Hrvey into your calendar!

New leave isn’t showing up in Google Calendar

The way calendar feeds (the iCal format) works is that the calendar in question periodically checks if there’s been any changes. How often it checks depends on the calendar - from our testing it looks like Google Calendar can take about 8 hours between checks. So if you book new leave shortly after a refresh, it will take some hours before Google Calendar will refresh again. This is unfortunately not something Hrvey can influence (though we don’t understand why Google doesn’t allow users to configure e.g. hourly refreshes).

If this latency is unacceptable to you, check out our direct Google Calendar integration that comes with out Google Workspaces integration - that one updates instantly as we can send the updates directly to Google instead of waiting for them to ask us. The integrated calendar currently always shows the entire organization’s leave, but more configurability is planned.

If you have any further questions, feel free to write us at support@hrvey.com

If you don’t already have an account you can learn more and sign up for free at hrvey.com