Google Calendar integration — approved leave on a shared team calendar
Install the SquadBear Google Calendar app and approved time off appears automatically as all-day events on one shared absence calendar your whole team can see.
Install the SquadBear Google Calendar app and approved time off shows up on a shared team calendar automatically — no one copies dates across, and nobody has to remember to. It's one-way and least-privilege by design: SquadBear writes to a calendar it creates for you, and cannot touch any other calendar you own.
What it does
An admin connects Google once. SquadBear creates a calendar called SquadBear – Absences in that Google Workspace and keeps it in step with your leave data:
- Approved leave becomes an all-day event. One event per absence, titled with the person's name.
- It stays correct. Dates edited, leave cancelled, a request partially cancelled — the calendar follows, every time.
- It looks ahead 12 months, matching the iCal absence feed.
Share that one calendar with the team and everyone sees who's off, in the calendar they already have open all day.
It cannot read your other calendars
The app requests a single Google Calendar permission: calendar.app.created. That scope grants access only to calendars the app itself created — so the token SquadBear holds physically cannot open your personal calendar, your meeting rooms, or anything else in your Google Workspace. This isn't restraint on our part. It's a permission we never asked for and don't have.
Nobody's sick leave goes on a shared calendar
By default an event reads "Anna Kowalska · Out of office" — the dates are shared, the reason is not. Under GDPR, sick leave is health data (Article 9), and a calendar the whole company can read is precisely the wrong place to publish it.
If every leave type in your workspace is genuinely safe for everyone to see, an admin can turn on leave types in the event title per installation. It is off unless you choose it.
Setting it up
- An admin opens Admin → Apps and installs Google Calendar.
- They sign in with Google and approve the one calendar permission.
- SquadBear creates the shared absence calendar and backfills approved leave.
- Share the new calendar with your team from Google Calendar, as you would any other.
From then on it keeps itself up to date. There is nothing to run and nothing to re-import.
Or just ask your assistant
Related
- Subscribe to the iCal absence feed — read-only, works with Outlook and Apple Calendar
- How leave approvals work
- Run SquadBear from Claude · from ChatGPT
Frequently asked questions
Can SquadBear see or change our existing Google calendars?
No. The app asks for the calendar.app.created scope, which grants access only to calendars SquadBear itself created. Your team's real calendars — personal, meeting rooms, everything else in the Google Workspace — are outside what the token can reach at all. It is not a permission we choose not to use; it is a permission we never hold.
Does the event say why someone is off?
Not by default. Events read "Anna Kowalska · Out of office", with the leave type deliberately withheld — sick leave is health data under GDPR Article 9, and a shared calendar is the wrong place for it. An admin can opt in to showing leave types per installation, and should only do so if every leave type in the workspace is safe for everyone to see.
Is this a two-way sync?
No. It is one-way, SquadBear to Google. Approved leave becomes events; nothing you do in Google Calendar is ever read back into SquadBear. Deleting an event in Google does not cancel anyone's leave — and the next sync will simply put it back.
What happens when leave is cancelled or the dates change?
The calendar follows. Every sync converges on what SquadBear currently holds as true, so an edited request moves its event, a cancelled one removes it, and a partially cancelled one shortens it. Replays and out-of-order deliveries cannot corrupt the calendar, because the job is only a trigger — SquadBear's own database is the source of truth.
How is this different from the iCal absence feed?
The iCal feed is a read-only subscription each person adds to their own calendar app, and it works with Outlook and Apple Calendar too. The Google Calendar app is installed once by an admin and writes to a single shared calendar for the whole workspace. Use the feed if your team is not on Google Workspace, or if you would rather each person subscribed themselves.
What happens if we uninstall it?
The sync stops and the OAuth token is revoked. The calendar SquadBear created stays in your Google Workspace with the events it had, so nothing disappears from anyone's view; you can delete it yourself if you would rather it went.
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