Set up your organisation

The setup wizard launches automatically the first time an admin signs in, and lives at Settings → Setup wizard whenever you want to pick it up again. It’s admin-only, shows your progress as a row of step pills, and every step except the last has a Skip for now button — nothing forces you to finish in one sitting. If you leave it unfinished, a banner reminds you: “Finish setting up your organisation →”.

Step 1 — Welcome

Confirm your Organisation name and answer Where are you based? (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, or somewhere else). The location only pre-selects the bank-holiday region later in the wizard — you can still change it there.

Step 2 — Leave year & allowances

This step carries a “Set once” warning: the leave-year start is painful to change once bookings exist, so decide it deliberately.

• Leave year starts in — the month your leave year begins (January and April are the common UK choices). An Advanced option lets it start on a day other than the 1st.
• Default annual allowance — in days; 28 is the UK statutory starting point. You can override per person later.
• Accrual mode — Upfront (full allowance available immediately) or Monthly (accrues over the year).
• Carry-over — None, Capped (with a cap in days), or Unlimited.

Step 3 — Leave types

A suggested set is pre-ticked — Annual leave, Sick leave, Unpaid leave, Compassionate leave — with Maternity/paternity and Working from home available but un-ticked. Each type has three toggles: deducts from allowance, needs approval, and shows as away. Sick leave never deducts from the holiday allowance. Add anything else with Add type.

Step 4 — Bank holidays & shutdowns

• Pick your Bank holiday region: England & Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland.
• Close the business on bank holidays & closures — tick if you shut on those days.
• Choose how allowances relate to bank holidays: Allowances INCLUDE bank holidays (they’re deducted from each person’s allowance when the business closes) or Allowances are PLUS bank holidays (no deduction). Weekends never deduct — only days someone is scheduled to work count.
• Add Company shutdowns (for example a Christmas shutdown) as named date ranges.

Step 5 — Working hours

Everyone starts on Mon–Fri full-time. Create working-hours templates here for other patterns — 4-day weeks, part-time, shift patterns — and assign them per person or per department later.

Step 6 — Your people

Bulk-add your team with the staff CSV: Download CSV template, fill it in, Preview, then Import. A checkbox controls whether invite emails go out now or later. You can skip this entirely and invite people one by one from the People page.

Step 7 — Approvals

Two choices:

• Managers approve (recommended) — no policy needed. Requests cascade: the person’s team managers, then department managers, then any manager.
• Set up an approval policy — explicit approvers and levels for the whole organisation, built right here. See Approval rules and policies.

Step 8 — You’re all set

A read-only recap of everything you chose, with quick links to Settings, People and the wall chart. Click Finish setup and you’re in.