Add and manage employee profiles

Employee and department management is where you maintain employee records, organise staff into departments, and prepare people for scheduling, the time clock and the Employee Portal.

It is not the same as:

• Schedule Management, which builds and publishes rotas;
• Employee Permissions, which decides which admin tools someone can open;
• HR records and certificates, which are separate areas.

1. In Schedule Management, create your shift types, for example day shift, night shift or long day.
2. Create your departments, for example nursing, healthcare assistants, activities, kitchen, housekeeping and administration.
3. Use Add Employee to enter personal, contact and employment details.
4. On the employee form, assign the allowed shift types and the available working days.
5. Set the maximum weekly hours and confirm the person is active if they should appear on schedules.
6. Enter or confirm the time clock PIN if your home uses clocking.
7. Create a portal account if the employee needs to sign in.
8. In Employee Permissions, grant admin access only where it is genuinely required.

Departments and shift types must exist before you can assign them, and you cannot create a department from the employee form.

• Allowed shift types — the patterns this person may work. Assigning a shift type does not place them on the rota; a manager still builds or generates the schedule.
• Available working days — the days they are normally available. Selecting a day shows general availability rather than guaranteeing work.
• Maximum weekly hours — the agreed weekly figure, used in scheduling and workforce planning.
• Time clock PIN — needed for clocking in and out. PINs are private and should be treated like a bank card PIN.
• Portal account — the login for My Schedule, requests, policies and similar. Day-to-day admin access is managed separately in Employee Permissions.

• Search filters the list by name as you type.
• The status filter switches between active, inactive and all employees.
• The department filter narrows the list to one department, and can be combined with the status filter.

Marking someone inactive keeps their profile but treats them as outside the active workforce:

• Automatic schedule generation excludes them.
• Manual shift assignment excludes them; they cannot be assigned.
• They no longer appear as a shift-swap colleague.
• Past schedules, holiday records and time clock history are preserved while the profile exists.
• They are still visible under the inactive and all filters.

Use inactive when someone has left or should not be scheduled, but you still need their rota history, leave records, attendance history or HR trail.

Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. Deleting an employee removes the profile and also removes the linked portal account, scheduled shifts, holiday and leave records, holiday balance records, time clock entries, shift-swap requests and other records linked to that person.

There is no undo and no archive step. When history must be kept, make the employee inactive instead of deleting them.

Before deleting, ask whether you still need the person's rota or attendance history, whether payroll, audit or HR reports reference the profile, and whether inactive would be enough to stop scheduling and portal access.

1. Complete a final review of upcoming shifts, holidays and attendance.
2. Remove or reassign future work in Schedule Management.
3. Set the employee to inactive.
4. Confirm they no longer appear in automatic scheduling, manual assignment or swap lists.
5. Keep the profile if historical records must remain available.
6. Delete only when permanent removal is genuinely required.

You can add departments, view existing ones, and delete a department that is no longer used. There is no inactive setting for a department; it is either kept or deleted.

Deleting a department is not blocked when employees are still assigned. Those employees are not deleted, but their department field is cleared, and shift types belonging to that department are removed with it. A shift type still used on live schedules cannot be removed until those references are cleared.

A safer removal process is to list the employees in that department, move them elsewhere, review the shift types the department owns, check any reports that filter by department, and only then delete.

The import and export page holds the employee template and Excel import, the employee list exports, and the initial credentials download. Some actions require full administrator access.

• Download the official Excel template first and do not rename the column headings.
• Complete one row per employee, upload the file, then check the messages and verify the new records.
• Export Excel and Export PDF produce a spreadsheet or a printable list grouped by department.

The initial credentials export produces a CSV containing names, usernames, newly generated temporary passwords, time clock PINs, emails and departments. It includes only employees who are active, have a linked portal account and have never signed in.

Running the export again generates new temporary passwords, so passwords from an earlier download stop working. Treat the file as highly confidential, give each employee only their own details, and delete the file securely afterwards.

Once someone signs in for the first time, they drop off this export. If they later forget their password, use the normal password reset on the employee form.