How to sync your team’s leave calendar with Google Calendar and Outlook

Seeing who is on leave shouldn't require logging into another tool. Collabin can publish your leave calendar as a standard ICS feed that Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar subscribe to directly — set it up once and approved leaves show up in the calendar your team already uses, updating automatically.

What you'll need

• A Collabin account on the Advanced or Pro plan (calendar feeds are not included in the Free plan).
• Access to the calendar app where you want the leaves to appear.

Step 1: Create a calendar feed in Collabin

1. Sign in to your Collabin dashboard.
2. Open Calendar Sync in the navigation.
3. Click Generate calendar link and choose the feed's scope:
   • My calendar — your own approved and pending leaves, plus company holidays.
   • Team calendar — approved leaves of a specific team, plus company holidays.
   • Company calendar — approved leaves across your whole organization, plus company holidays.
4. Collabin generates two links for the feed:
   • an HTTPS link ending in .ics, e.g. https://api.collabin.eu/api/calendar/feed/<your-token>.ics
   • a webcal:// link, which some calendar apps prefer for subscriptions.

The link contains a long random token instead of a password — anyone holding the link can read that feed, so treat it like a credential. You can regenerate the token at any time, which immediately invalidates the old link.

Step 2: Subscribe from your calendar app

Google Calendar

1. Open Google Calendar on the web.
2. In the left sidebar, click the + next to Other calendars and choose From URL.
3. Paste the HTTPS .ics link and click Add calendar.

The leaves appear as a separate calendar that you can recolor or hide. Note that Google refreshes external calendars on its own schedule — typically every 12 to 24 hours — so a freshly approved leave can take a while to show up.

Outlook

1. In Outlook on the web, go to Add calendar → Subscribe from web.
2. Paste the HTTPS .ics link, give the calendar a name, and confirm.

The desktop Outlook applications pick the subscription up automatically once it is added to your account. Outlook usually refreshes subscribed calendars every few hours.

Apple Calendar

1. In Calendar on macOS, choose File → New Calendar Subscription…
2. Paste either the HTTPS or the webcal:// link and click Subscribe.
3. Pick a refresh interval — every hour works well for leave data.

On iPhone and iPad, simply tapping the webcal:// link opens the subscription dialog.

What the feed contains

Leaves appear as all-day events, alongside company holidays. Team and company feeds contain approved leaves only; your personal feed also includes your own pending requests, marked as tentative. To keep the file small and fast to sync, the feed covers a rolling window of 3 months back and 12 months ahead — everything a calendar realistically displays.

The feed is read-only: deleting or editing an event in your calendar app never changes anything in Collabin.

Managing and revoking feeds

Back on the Calendar Sync page you can:

• list every calendar link you've created,
• regenerate a link's token (the old one stops working immediately — useful if a link leaked or a teammate left), and
• revoke a link entirely.

If your plan changes, existing feeds remain visible and manageable, so you never lose control over previously shared links.

Troubleshooting

• The calendar shows up empty. Team and company feeds include approved leaves only — pending requests appear solely in your personal feed.
• A new leave isn't showing yet. Calendar providers cache feeds; Google in particular can take up to a day. The feed itself is always current the moment it is fetched.
• The link stopped working. The token was likely regenerated or the link revoked. Create or copy a fresh link from the Calendar Sync page and re-subscribe.