Getting started - how to set up Timetastic

Welcome to Timetastic, let's do this!

This quick start guide walks you through the initial setup. By the end you'll have a good understanding of the ins and outs and be ready to start tracking time off.

• By the end of step 3: you'll have your team added ✅
• By the end of step 7: you'll have gone through all the settings and be ready to book some time off 🏖

1. Add users
2. Set their work schedule
3. Public holidays
4. Create your departments
5. Customise leave types
6. Privacy and access
7. Reporting

1. Add Users

The first step is getting your team onto Timetastic, you can add them one by one or in bulk. 

One by one

This is your regular, day-to-day way to add people to Timetastic.

Select 'Users' from the top menu, and you'll see a blue '+' button to 'Add a user'.

Bulk upload

You'll also spot the 'Upload users' option. If you've got a dozen or more on your team, you might find it quicker import them from Excel. We cover this in more detail here: Bulk upload Users

2. Setting work schedules

Next we need to set their working hours. It's important we set each users work hours correctly - so that deductions from their annual allowance will be accurate.

Select Users > [Click users name] > Schedule.

• Check the boxes for morning / afternoon shifts
• Edit the start and end times

3. Public holidays

Does your team get Public holidays off work? If they do then we can drop all those days straight into their calendar.

In a users profile, we need to select the 'Allowance' tab, then check the 'Public holidays' box, and select the relevant country and region.

We've also got a more detailed guide to Public holidays in Timetastic.

4. Create your departments

You'll want to create departments that align with your company structure. And give each department a 'boss' to approve all the bookings.

We do all this in Settings > Departments.

Once you're in Departments you'll see it's self explanatory - use the drop down to choose the boss, and set a maximum absent to make sure you don't have too many people off at the same time.

Struggling in the Departments screen? We have a dedicated article with screenshots: Departments: Add, Edit, and Delete.

5. Customise leave types

Next we're going to head over to Settings > Leave Types.

Timetastic is already setup with the common types of time off (holidays, sick leave, maternity and so on), but you can create as many custom types as you need, there's no limit.

Click '+ New leave type' to create additional leave types. 

And select if you want it to deduct from your annual allowance, whether it needs approving, or should be included in maximum absent rules.

You can also set what colour it'll appear on your calendars:

And choose a suitable icon:

6. Privacy and access

This step is all about understanding who can see what. As the administrator you get to see everything, but the rest of your team will have more restricted views and information.

Here's a summary of the different permissions:

Admin Users

• Setup the account
• Approve leave requests for anyone
• See the details of anyones annual leave
• Set / edit annual entitlement

Users

• They will not see the 'Settings' or 'Users' menu items
• Can't change their annual leave entitlement
• Can't cancel any bookings that are in the past - they can cancel their future bookings
• Can't see other employees annual allowances or summarised calendar information

Department bosses / Approvers

A department boss or approver don't get to see the 'Settings' options, but they do get to see how many days their employees have left and can view the Calendar and summary information.

Department bosses can also see 'Users' from the main menu but their access is restricted to only those in their department. This means they can add new Users to their department as well as edit and manage information within their employee's profile.

Privacy Modes

You've also got some privacy options if you want to lock things down further.

7. Reporting

Reports can be found at Settings > Reporting & back up.

You can download data to Excel anytime you need, and from there you can filter, sort, pivot, and lookup as much as you want.

You can download a specific year, take a full backup of all your data, or grab an audit trail.

You'll also spot a table of recent bookings, you can download that data too. The choice is yours. 

But wait ... there’s more!

Once you’ve sailed through these steps you'll have all the basics setup and ready to make some bookings.

But seeing you're down here, if you have a few more minutes spare:

• Input past holidays and time off
• Set your annual carry forward
• Integrate with Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Google Workspace