This article will show you how to configure different parts of Planday by taking you through short guided video tutorials.

You need to have three pieces of information to log in to Planday.

You and everyone on your team will use these three items to log in on both the app and web versions of Planday.

Use Departments to separate different work areas and keep your schedules organized and efficient. Departments can also be different locations of your business or separate areas within your company, each with its schedule and employees.

In Planday, you can use Employee groups to describe a job, a role or a function (for example waiter, receptionist, cashier). Employee groups hold the pay rate for the employee and allow employees to work in multiple roles. They are also needed to create Positions on the schedule.

Populating Planday with your employees is essential to getting your schedule up and running. Create employees by filling in their data. Assign new employees to one or more Departments and add them to Employee groups. Finally, invite your staff to Planday and give them access to the schedule.

Assuming you have created Departments, created job roles in Employee groups, and invited a group of employees to Planday, it is time to bring it together. You can go to the Schedule page and create shifts for your employees.

Schedule templates are the next stage of scheduling and allow you to plan and schedule weeks in advance. By creating a default schedule template, using a mixture of assigned and open shifts, you can create a flexible template that can be applied up to 14 times in one go. This will reduce your scheduling time and allow you to plan more effectively, giving you and your employees a clear view of who is working.

Open shifts in your schedule are shifts that are not yet assigned to a specific employee but are available to be requested by employees. You can set the start and end time, select the particular Employee group and position, define the kind of shift you know you need to fill, and leave it open. The shift will show as a placeholder on the schedule. Your employees can then request to take this available shift if they match the Department and Employee group required by the Shift type.

If you are having difficulties logging in, there's most likely an error with one of these details.

Each employee has a customizable profile that you can fill out or have the employee fill in. If you need to add more sections to hold more details than the standard fields, you can edit the setup form Settings > People > Employee form setup and add additional fields.

On Planday, it is possible to set up the hourly wage of multiple employees (with the same rate and valid from the same date) at the same time from the Employee Groups page. Wages are set in the Employee group and thus attached to employees belonging to that group. This allows employees to belong to multiple groups but have different pay rates per group if necessary. Wages can also be assigned individually or set to apply from a specific date automatically by editing the Employee profile under the Employment tab.

Salaries differ from wages as they do not rely on shift data. A salary is a fixed amount based on a pay period paid monthly by default. You can choose the allocation method for the salary cost distribution across your schedule, giving you an estimate of what a fixed-salary person will cost you per day or hour.

Within Planday, you can communicate with your staff directly through messages without relying on external social media groups or communication tools such as Whatsapp. You can send a message to a specific employee, an Employee group, an entire department, or across your organization. Employees will receive an in-app notification informing them they have a message waiting for them.

You can share information through the Newsfeed and the Events tab to update your staff on general issues. You can also force an answer should you require a reply from your employees.

By setting Access levels you can let some employees have additional access to Planday functions to perform managerial tasks. By default, there are three access levels in Planday: Schedule Manager, People/HR Manager, and Admin. An optional Account admin role gets assigned to an admin that signed up for Planday. The access areas for each access level can be seen in this article.

The Punch Clock allows you to bridge the gap between paying for the scheduled time and precise worked time. Punch Clock can be set up in a number of ways:

Once you have started using Punch Clock, you must edit or approve the Punch Clock entries as they come. Approving worked times marks the corresponding shift as ready for payroll (green) and updates the schedule with the approved times for that shift. Once approved, the entries cannot be edited, and approved times are used for payroll.

Automatic breaks take the trouble out of making deductions for break time. By creating a Break rule, you can set a pause interval to automatically appear on a shift that goes over a certain length on your schedule.

The most common use for Shift types is recording sickness on the schedule and reporting this data for payroll reports. Shift types can also be used to change shift rates or add supplements. This is handy when paying different rates for evening or weekend shifts.

Once shifts on the schedule have a specific Shift type, you can go to Reports > Shift type statistics for a report based on utilising these Shift types. For example, you could run a report to see the ratio between reported sickness and worked shifts.

Contracted availability lets you see the hours you have obliged with an employee. This will let you see the specific contracted times or days an employee should be available for work. Having availability information will allow you to schedule the right people for the correct times matching their work availability. Contracted availability can be set up individually by editing an employee's account.

Positions and sections allow you to plan your schedule when filling a shift with the right employee is more important than all employees having a shift. Scheduling in the Positions view provides flexibility, highlighting your schedule gaps by position instead of by staff.

You can compare Revenue data against your Scheduled costs to highlight salary percentages or make other cost comparisons. Revenue can be added manually to the Planday by going to Settings > Reports > Revenue. You can also set up forecasts and budgets to ensure you meet your goals and make changes to the schedule if you see things going over budget.

You can send out Contracts or any documents your employees need to sign through Planday. Employees cannot add information to these Documents; they can only sign them. These files are saved on their profile and can be reviewed later. Signing contracts can be anything from employment terms, promotions in salary, work equipment loans, handing out keys or anything where you need an agreement from any employee.

The Contract rules feature a scheduling tool that allows you to track the number of scheduled working hours for an employee. A red, orange, or green indicator appears around the employee's profile picture on the schedule to highlight potential scheduling issues. Contract rules can also be used for managing Flex/Overtime accounts.

You can use the Payroll export function to quickly generate a payroll report in Excel, PDF or your preferred payroll integration system such as Sage 50, QuickBooks online and more. Approve existing worked hours and take action on pending leave requests before going for a pay run. See what to prepare before creating a payroll report.

Auto-schedule allows you to automate your scheduling to make it even easier to schedule more efficiently. You will need specific information in the system to ensure auto-scheduling runs effectively, such as Working time rules, Contracted availability, Contract rules, and at least 12 weeks' worth of previous scheduling data.

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