Managing your team

Everything related to the people in your company lives in the Administration section of the side menu (Employees and Departments) and in Team → Presence. This guide shows you how to onboard your team, distribute permissions and deactivate people who leave without losing their history.

Inviting employees

1. Go to Employees (side menu) and click Add employee.
2. Fill in their name, email, job title (optional), department (optional) and role.
3. Click Create employee.

When created, the person receives an invitation email in their language with a single-use activation link to choose their password: passwords are never sent by email. The link expires after 7 days; if it expires or does not arrive, resend it from their record (Account access) or they can use "Forgot your password?". That way they can start clocking in from day one. They don't need to verify their email: by adding them yourself, you're vouching that the address is correct. Their start date is recorded as the day you create them, and it's the basis for prorating their holidays for the current year.

There's no limit on the number of people, either during the 3-month free trial or with an active subscription. If the trial has ended and the company hasn't subscribed, the account is read-only and the platform warns you that you can't add employees until you subscribe.

Coming from another platform, or have your staff list in an Excel file? Use the importer to onboard the whole team at once.

Departments

Departments help you organise the team and define what each manager sees. In Departments (side menu):

1. Click New department and enter its name.
2. Save with Create department. Then assign people to the department from each employee's profile (Employees → Edit).
3. A department's manager is the person with the Manager role and that department in their profile: they approve the requests of the department's employees and propose corrections to them. The Departments list shows who it is in each one. There can be more than one, or none: then HR or the administrators decide.

You can edit or delete a department at any time from the same list.

Roles and permissions

Each person has a single role, which decides what they can do in the panel:

The role is chosen when creating the employee and can be changed later by editing them. A few limits designed for your peace of mind:

• A company administrator can assign the employee, manager and HR roles.
• An HR person can only assign employee and manager: they can't grant themselves (or anyone else) the HR role or the administrator role.
• Nobody manages themselves, and HR manages employees and managers: the profile, schedule (including the definition of a schedule they have), shift-plan shifts, working-time arrangement, the recalculation of their scheduled hours, record corrections, cancelling an absence of theirs that is already approved and covers past days, and the approval of the requests of an HR person or an administrator are handled by the administrators. An administrator can also manage another one (for example, deactivate them when they leave); the company is never left without anyone to administer it, and the administrator role is granted by AccessTime support.
• A manager approves and proposes corrections only for the employees of their department: HR or the administrators handle another manager's matters, and only the administrators those of HR or of an administrator, even if they are in that department.
• If you are the only administrator, you record your own schedule and working-time arrangement in your profile (the link is in Employees), with a reason of at least 20 characters that stays in the log. The same goes for your absences and clock-in incidents, even if there is HR: HR does not manage the administrators.

Real-time presence

Team → Presence gives you the current snapshot:

• A summary of how many people are in, out and the total number of active employees.
• Who's in right now, with their department, clock-in time and a badge if they're working remotely.
• Today's entries, from most recent to oldest, with type and time already converted to your company's time zone.

Managers only see the people in their department on this screen; admins and HR see the whole company. Hours worked and their historical detail are found in the reports.

Deactivating (archiving) employees

When someone leaves the company they're not deleted: their employment is ended, so their entries and history are kept for the working-time record.

1. In Employees, click End employment on their row.
2. Enter their last working day and when they lose access:
   • When their last day ends (the usual choice if they are still working today): they stay active until the end of that day, can clock out and, after midnight, the termination happens on its own, in your name. If at midnight they are still on a shift that started that day (night shift), the termination waits until they clock out of that shift (at most, the maximum length of a night shift in your company). With a future day, the termination is scheduled for the end of that day.
   • Right now: their sessions are closed at once and they can no longer clock in. With a last day that has already passed, the termination is always immediate, with that date.
3. Once terminated, they disappear from the presence screen and no longer count towards the active employees you're billed for. They keep read-only access to their record and monthly closures, and whatever their phone clocked offline up to their last day arrives as an incident for HR to review. In the Shift planner they still appear, marked as terminated, in the weeks up to their last day: the shift of a day within their employment can be corrected or removed (with a reason if the day has passed), recording who did it, with which role and when.
4. If they come back, edit them and tick the Active box again: they get their account back and their return counts from today (the days between their last day and today fall outside their employment). If the termination was a mistake and their last day was before yesterday, also set the leaving date to yesterday in the same save: those days are within their employment again, with their working time and their absences, and who did it, with which role and when is recorded. If they were a workers' representative, the termination removed the mark and its scope: a company admin has to grant it again from their profile.

In their profile, the leaving date also schedules the termination (from today onwards, with Active ticked) or cancels it (empty).

Ending employment deletes no data and can be undone (step 4). It's the recommended way to handle departures, long leaves of absence or seasonal staff.

Next steps

• Assign schedules to new people so their deviations are calculated correctly.
• Set up the QR kiosk if part of the team clocks in from a shared tablet.
• If you're starting from scratch, review the getting started guide.