title: Getting Started description: Go from account setup to your first published rota. public: true reviewed: 24082026

Getting Started

This guide takes an organisation from sign-up to its first operational week. Your first 30 days are Advanced in full, so everything described here is available while you decide.

1) Create your account and your organisation

Create an account, then choose to set up an organisation. If a colleague has already invited you, redeem the invitation instead and skip to step 3.
Give the trading name, the registered legal name and the registered address. These are asked for at the start because they end up on invoices and in your records, and correcting them later is more work than entering them now.
Set what your organisation calls a site. A care provider usually says Home, a retailer says Branch, a hospital says Ward. The wording you choose is used throughout, so the screens read the way your team already speaks.

2) Set up your sites and departments

Add each site, with its bed count and safe staffing minimum if those apply to you.
Create departments, and mark which ones count towards safe staffing. A day where the early staff leave before the late staff arrive is not covered, however many shifts it holds, and this is what lets the system say so.
Set your payroll cut-off day. It can be overridden per site where sites genuinely differ.

3) Add your people

Invite managers and staff by email, or import an existing spreadsheet.
If you import, the continuous service start date is required for every person. It is not defaulted, because defaulting it would remove statutory family pay eligibility from everyone you bring across.
Record a pay line for each person: their role, rate and hours. Somebody who works two roles at two rates gets two pay lines, and both stay open at once.

4) Build and publish your first rota

Build the week, assigning people to shifts. Where somebody holds more than one pay line, you choose which role they are working.
Rest-break conflicts, the 48-hour weekly limit and safe staffing shortfalls are shown while the week is still a draft.
Publish when you are ready. Staff see their own shifts only once the week is published, because a draft is a working copy and nobody should be arranging childcare around a shift that has not been decided.

5) Run the week

Staff clock in and out from their own device, or from a shared tablet mounted at the site.
Review anything flagged, then approve the week. Approving freezes it, so the figures that go to payroll cannot move afterwards.
Approve leave requests with the coverage impact for that day visible before you confirm.

6) Keep the evidence current

Training expiries, DBS renewals and document reviews are checked nightly, so a certificate that lapses is raised without anyone having to remember it.
Publish a policy and track who has acknowledged which version.

7) Publish to your website, if you want to

Register your website endpoint and record consent for anyone appearing in a photograph.
Staff draft gallery posts, events and vacancies. A manager reviews and approves.
Approved content is delivered to your website, signed so your site can verify it came from you.