Your first day in Willow

Your first hour in Willow sets up the places, teams and rules it works from. The Get started card on Home lists the same three steps.

Name your employer

Willow keeps people records for one employer. Your employer asks for its name, time zone, country (a two-letter code such as AU) and currency (a three-letter code such as AUD). Dates of employment and leave use this time zone. Willow encodes no country rules: you supply your own policies. The owner can change these later from Settings.

Add your places and teams

Open Settings and add:

• Locations, each with its own time zone.
• Departments.
• Working schedules: the hours worked on each day of the week. Leave is calculated from the schedule in force on each day, and a schedule never changes once created; make a new one when hours change.
• Document categories: for each, choose whether the person it is about and their current manager may read it, and whether the person is asked to acknowledge receipt. Acknowledging receipt records that a document was received. It is not a signature.

Write your leave policies

Under Leave policies, write each policy in your own words, with how many weeks of scheduled hours it accrues a year and how far a balance may go negative. A new policy is a draft until the owner approves that version; only approved versions can be used. Willow does not encode award or statutory rules.

Make your checklists

Under Lifecycle templates, make a template for each kind of change: Joiner, Mover and Leaver. Give it a name and up to five tasks. For each task choose who does it (HR, the manager, IT, payroll or the employee), when it is due in days after the start, end or change date (negative for before), and whether it needs evidence. A task for an external system or device always needs evidence of what was done. Each case keeps the template version it started from.

Invite your team

Add people with a joiner or move in from BambooHR. Then open Access to give each person the permissions their job needs; Access and privacy explains each one. Anyone without a permission is an employee: they see their own record and leave, and managers also see their own team.

Optional connections

The owner's Connections page turns on email notices, an optional sign-in provider and model drafts of checklists. All three begin off, and everything in Willow works without them.