Set up your company

Prepare your company in this order, so that your employees have the correct holidays, Leave Balances and approvers from their first day. Leavely does not make you follow the order.

A new company already has five Leave Types, the Annual Leave Allowance Type with its Standard policy, and the Leave Calendars of this leave year and the next. It has no Holiday Location and no Department.

1. Sign up and set up the company: Choose the leave year carefully, because nobody can change it later. See The Leave Year Policy. Leavely then opens the Wall Chart, and you are the Owner.
2. Check the work schedule and the leave request rules (Owner only): The working days decide which days a Leave Request counts, and a change applies only to new requests.
3. Import public holidays: The Holiday Location list in the employee form shows only the locations that you imported. An employee without a Holiday Location has no public holidays.
4. Set up allowances: A Leave Type can use days only from an Allowance Type that exists. New employees get their Leave Balances from the default policy as soon as you add them. See Allowances and entitlement and Carry-over.
5. Set up leave types: Link each new Leave Type to its Allowance Type, and decide which Leave Types need approval before people send requests.
6. Create departments: You select the Department of each employee when you add them.
7. Complete your own details (Owner only): Your Start Date is the day you set up the company, so your Annual Leave counts from that day. Change it if you started earlier, and select your Country, your Holiday Location and your Department.
8. Verify your email address: You cannot add employees until you verify it.
9. Add your employees: Select the Holiday Location and the Department of each employee, and each employee gets an invitation. Only the Owner can make someone an Admin. A new company is on the Free Plan with 5 Seats, and you use one of them. When all Seats are in use, Add Employee opens an upgrade prompt instead. See Plans and seats and Upgrade from the Free Plan.
10. Choose Department Managers: You can select only people who have joined, so do this after they accept their invitations.
11. Approve requests: The Owner and the Admins can approve every request from the first day. Until a Department has a Department Manager, they are the only approvers for its members, and they always approve the requests of employees who have no Department. The notification bell shows the requests that wait.