Once you have familiarized yourself with the Dashboard, here are our top tips for getting started on your Appogee Leave trial. These topics are standalone or can be worked through in the below order. While there’s no correct way to set up your Appogee Leave, it’s a good idea to get your Work Profiles set up before you add Employees.
- Organize your Work Profiles
- Configure your Leave and Sickness Types
- Set up your Teams
- Add Employees
- Set up Approval Flows
- Customize it
Organize your Work Profiles
You may have employees working different core hours, or some that are granted more leave allowance per year than others. Appogee Leave lets you cater for these types of eventualities with the Work Profiles feature.
Go to Leave > Admin & Config > Work Profiles.
You’ll see we have provided you with a default Work Profile called Full Time, with a Leave Entitlement of 20 days/150 hours. Feel free to use this one or you can edit or delete it as you see fit. It’s also possible to set up Leave on an accrual basis, if that’s how your organisation works.
Things to try on this page:
- Add your own Work Profiles
- Create a new Work Profile to fit with your company's Leave Allowance. Check if the Pro Rata formula option is something you'd like to use by hovering over the ? icon
- Configure Public Holidays
- Appogee Leave has a number of Public Holidays set up so the system will automatically mark these as non-working days. You can import our defaults, edit them, or create your own
- Change the Working Rota
- This will help with Leave Entitlement calculations and is especially useful if you work with accruals. This also assists with calculating half day leave as the system gives you a morning and afternoon session
- Change the Entitlement Settings and have a look at the Allowance Calculator
- See how easy it is to use the Allowance Calculator so you won’t need to manually calculate the leave allowance if you change the properties of the Work Profile, or if you move someone from one Work Profile to another
For more information take a look at the following: Creating & Editing Work Profiles, Managing Public Holidays & Allowance Calculator Tool
Configure your Leave and Sickness Types
Your organisation may give additional days leave for volunteering, or you may want to track employees who are out of the office for training purposes, it may also be necessary for your organisation to record and report on types of sickness people are taking. Situations like these can be supported using the Leave Types feature.
Go to Leave > Admin & Config > Leave Types.
We have a range of default Leave & Sickness types, which you can import, or you can set these up yourself. This gives you the flexibility to configure your Appogee Leave to fit exactly with your business requirements.
Things to try on this page:
- Import Defaults
- Use the Add Defaults icon to select which of the default Leave Types you would like to have available for employees to book
- Create your own
- Use the Create icon to add your own Leave or Sickness Type
For more information take a look at the following: Configuring Leave & Sickness Types, & Adjusting Employee's Allowance
Set up your Teams
Once your Work Profiles and Leave Types are in place, it's a good idea to set up your Team structure. This builds your Org Chart and enables approval flows for Leave Requests.
Familiarize yourself with the Org Chart category within the Directory section, making sure to click 'Show Members' in the top right corner. You'll see we have provided you with 12 Demo users in 5 different Teams. You can remove the Demo users at any time during your trial using the Remove Demo Data icon at the top.
Go to Organization.
Things to try on this page:
- Organization - Add a team
- Use the + icon to Create a new Team as a quick add option, or alternatively switch to Teams to configure a team fully
- Teams - Edit the main details of a Team
- Use the pencil icon, or go to the Teams tab to change the main details of a Team. Feel free to change the Demo data to reflect your org structure
- Virtual Teams - Investigate Virtual Teams
- Your organization may not require the set up of a Virtual Team, however it's a handy feature if you want to group users from different teams, for example for a cross-departmental project, or a team that is spread out geographically
- Employees - Add or Edit an Employee
- Use the Add Employee icon on the top right of the screen to add one of your own employees. Click on one of the Demo employees to explore what kind of editable options are available. (It is also possible to add employees in bulk, this step is explained in the next section of this article)
- User Roles & Access - Administer User Roles & Access
- You may wish to give additional user roles to some employees. Choose from Admin or HR Manager. Team Managers are automatically assigned
For more information, take a look at the following: Setting Up and Editing Teams, Setting Up Virtual Teams, & Managing User Roles
Add Employees
While it's simple to add users individually, you may need a quick way to add a lot of users into Appogee Leave. Once you have your Teams and Work Profiles in place, you can bulk import employees.
There are three options for uploading employees:
1. Add employee(s) manually
2. Integrate with Google Workspace (G Suite), Microsoft Office 365 or Xero
3. CSV Upload
Go to Add Employees.
You can add an employee manually using the Add Manually option, this is really useful for new starters or one off additions. Fill in the fields, making sure to fill in the mandatory boxes and click Register Employee.
If you've integrated with either Google Workspace, Office 365 or Xero, this will be an option for you on this page. The integration takes your basic employee data from your integrated account, and then all you need to do is assign a Team and Work Profile.
Alternatively, you may wish to upload your employees using the CSV Upload option. Just download the template, fill it in and upload.
For more information, take a look at the following: Registering New Employees, Google Workspace Integration, Office 365 Integration & CSV Upload Guide.
Approval Flows
Setting up Approval Flows is an important part of the process to ensure that Leave / Sickness Requests go to the right person.
Once Employees are added to the system and assigned to a team, Approval Flows can be created to configure where the requests go. The Approver could be the team manager or designated person to whom the Employee submits their requests.
This can be done in two areas, the Team settings section or on a specific employee.
You can also override approval flows so individual members can be configured to have different approvers to other members in their Team. This can be configured by ticking the override box below the approval flow.
Go to Leave > Admin & Config > Approval Flows.
Here you can create Approval Flows for all teams and select a Primary Approver as well as any Alternate Approvers the team requires. You can also Edit and Delete any existing Approval Flows.
For more information take a look at the following: Setting up Approvers
Customize it
Appogee Leave is highly configurable, so as well as making it look and feel like yours, you can make it fit exactly with your business requirements.
Go to Leave > Admin & Config > Configuration.
Things to try on this page:
- Edit your Email Templates
- Import the defaults we've provided, or create your own. Emails are automatically sent when an employee makes a change in the system. This could be that they've requested Leave, or a Team Manager has approved it
- Set up a Google or Office 365 Calendar
- If you've integrated with Google Workspace or Office 365 you can set up a Calendar so any Leave syncs and shows in your Employees' work calendars
Go to System Config.
As well as being highly configurable, you can make Appogee Leave feel like part of your brand. Add your own logo, change the theme colours and import your own profile picture.
Things to try on this page:
- Check the General Settings are going to work for you
- The default settings may or may not work for you or your company, change them here. There's options to change the date format and time-zones, as well as Leave or Reporting configurations. Activate or deactivate TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) here too
- Customize your Appogee Leave
- Add your Company Logo and change the colours to fit your branding
Go to Roles & Access.
Restrict or enable users specific access to parts of Appogee Leave with the Roles & Access section
Things to try on this page:
- Assign someone an additional role
- Appogee Leave caters for different role types, which means you can be sure only the relevant people are able to see sensitive employee information
For more information, take a look at the following: Email Templates & Managing User Roles
Feel free to take a look around at the rest of Appogee HR to see what you can do to fit with your business requirements. You can remove the Demo data by clicking the Remove Demo Data icon, also in the top right. If you have any questions about the product, please visit our support site or get in touch with support.appogeehr.com. Alternatively, if you would like to organize a short product demo, email sales@appogeehr.com.