In this video, you set up your company and employees in Leadtime. This is one of the most important steps because properly maintained employee data is the foundation for everything that follows: vacation management, payroll overviews, overtime tracking, and above all, full transparency about your company.
You start with company data – company name, legal form, address, contact details, and tax ID. This information automatically appears on your documents like invoices and proposals.
In the employee section, you'll discover the various tabs: Basics (master data and employment conditions), Timesheets (time entries per day and project), Vacations (complete vacation overview with entitlement, usage, and planning), Sickness (sick leave records), Overtime (overtime accumulation and reduction), Wage (salary and payslips), and Journal (internal notes).
When creating an employee, you enter the basic data and decide whether they get system access (Leadtime Access). During the trial period, unlimited licenses are free. You assign roles (Root, Team Lead, Employee, or custom) and teams – teams control access and visibility to projects. After saving, the employee automatically receives an invitation email and can fill in their own profile data.
Especially important are the phase-based settings: working hours, vacation days, and salary can be planned in advance with effective dates. When starting mid-year, you can correctly map remaining vacation days using two phases. Public holidays can also be set individually per employee if someone works abroad.
For larger teams, the data importer is recommended, allowing you to create all employees at once via CSV file. You get maximum benefit when all employees actively involved in the business use the system.
Now it's getting serious – we're setting up your company in Leadtime. And here's where the effort really pays off: If you set up your employees properly, you get clean data. You can manage vacation, track payroll, keep an eye on overtime. But most importantly: You finally get full transparency about your company. Levers become visible. Processes speed up significantly. So take the time to do this right. It's worth it. Let's go!
Alright, let's start with your company data. Here you enter the basics: company name, legal form, address, contact details. Why is this important? This data automatically appears in your documents, for example in the footer of invoices and proposals. And make sure to enter your tax ID here. It's not only printed on documents, it's also just practical to have it at hand. Enter it once, done.
Now we come to the most important part: Your employees. Here you see all employees of your company. And here's the thing: The cleaner you maintain this data, the more benefit you get from Leadtime. Let's first look at what you can see here, from the perspective that your team is already working with the system.
In the Basics tab you see all master data: name, email, address, date of birth. Here are also the conditions of employment: position, contract type, start and end date. And here at the bottom: working hours and salary. We'll come back to this in more detail in a moment.
In the Timesheets tab you see all time entries of the employee. Here you see: On which days did they book how much time? On which projects, on which tickets? This is gold for reporting. You see exactly where the working time goes.
In the Vacations tab you see the complete vacation overview. Here in the past: Which vacations has the employee already taken? And here's the current status: How much vacation are they entitled to by contract? How much have they already used? How much is left? And here at the bottom: What's coming up in the future? Which vacations are planned or requested?
In the Sickness tab you see all sick leave records. When was the employee sick? For how long? It's all documented here.
In the Overtime tab you see the overtime hours. Here you see: On which days did the employee work more than agreed? How many overtime hours have they accumulated? And here you can also reduce the overtime, for example through payout or compensatory time off.
In the Wage tab you see the payroll information. Here the salary is stored, bonuses, and you also see the monthly payslips.
And in the Journal you can keep internal notes. For example from employee reviews, feedback, or important agreements.
So. These are the most important tabs. All useful data that give you a great overview of your team.
Now let's create an employee. Here in the dialog you enter the basics. First name, last name, email, position. Here you can already upload an avatar, but you don't have to. The employee can also do this themselves later when they log in for the first time.
Now comes an important point: Leadtime Access. If you activate this box, the employee gets access to the system. This means a new user license is automatically triggered. This affects your monthly bill. But this is important: During your trial period you can add as many employees as you want for free. So don't hesitate!
Now you choose the role. You see here: Root, Team Lead, Employee. These are the standard roles that Leadtime provides. But you can also define your own roles. Here in the Roles and Rights area you can do that. But we won't go into depth on that now.
Now come the teams. Here you can assign the employee to one or more teams. What are teams anyway? Teams help you control access and visibility. Instead of giving each employee individual access to a project, you simply assign the whole team. Example: Your support team automatically gets access to all support projects. That saves you enormous time.
If you save now, two things happen: First, the employee is created. Second, the employee automatically receives an invitation email. This email contains a link through which they can log in for the first time.
And here's the cool part: The employee can then enter data themselves through their profile. For example, upload their profile picture, enter their address, their contact details. That saves you work! You can outsource part of the data entry to the employee. But vacation, sick leave, overtime, salary must be created by a team lead or someone with the appropriate rights in the system. Otherwise the employee might have too many vacation days.
So. The employee is created. Now let's look at what else you can configure.
Here in the Basic Data dialog you enter the personal information. Name, email, address, date of birth, phone number. These are the data you should enter manually when working with the employee.
Here you set the conditions of employment. Position, Type of Employment, so whether the employee is permanently employed, has a fixed-term contract, or is a freelancer. Here the income tax class. Start Date: when did the employee start?
And here very important: End Date. If you enter a date in the past here, the employee is marked as departed. They then disappear from the active list. This means: Exit Date in the past equals employee is no longer active.
Now it gets important. Here you set working hours, vacation, and salary.
First the public holidays. Remember? In the last video we set the standard holidays for your workspace. Here you can make an exception. If an employee works abroad, for example, you can set here that different holidays apply to them. For example Austria, Switzerland, USA, whatever fits.
Now the weekly working hours. Here you set how much the employee works per week and on which days. For example: Monday to Friday, 40 hours per week. Or: Only Monday, Wednesday, Friday if someone works part-time. Or: 20 hours per week instead of 40. This affects the planning tools. If you use the pipeline, for example, you can only schedule the employee on days where they're actually available according to this setting.
And this is also phase-based. You can set, for example: Starting January first next year, the employee only works part-time. You enter that now, and Leadtime automatically applies it from that date.
And now the vacation days. Here you enter how many vacation days the employee gets per year. Now pay attention, this is important if you're starting mid-year. Let's say: The employee has 30 vacation days per year by contract. But they've already used 10 days before you started with Leadtime.
Then you do it like this: Phase 1: From today until end of year, 20 days. Those are the remaining days for this year. Phase 2: Starting January first next year, 30 days. Those are the full days from next year on. This way the system knows exactly that it should only calculate with 20 days for the rest of the year.
In the Salary Settings tab you maintain the salary. Here again: You can plan this in phases. For example: Starting March first, the employee gets a raise. You enter that now, Leadtime applies it automatically. And here you enter bonuses: bonuses, Christmas pay, and so on.
Here the employee's bank details. Look: For security reasons you need to enter a verification code here. This is sent to you via email. This protects sensitive data. Account holder, IBAN, bank, BIC, everything you need for payroll transfers.
And at the very bottom: The insurance data. Health insurance, health insurance number, social security number, pension insurance number. You often need this in accounting. That's why it makes sense to set this up properly.
So. I know, that's a lot. If you have a large team, this is a lot of work manually. Therefore: Get someone to help you. An employee who can enter the data. Or, and this is the better way: Use the data importer.
With the data importer you can create all employees at once. You upload a CSV file with all the data we just saw. First name, last name, email, position, salary, vacation days, everything. Leadtime automatically recognizes the columns and assigns them. Maybe you can even export the data from a third-party system, from your old HR software, from Excel, wherever.
By the way: We have a separate video about the data importer. We go into real detail there. We also show you an example file that you can fill out. Check that out if you want to import larger amounts of data.
And now the most important point again: Leadtime brings you maximum benefit when ALL your employees use the system. As consistently as possible. Because only then do you have full transparency about your company. Only then do levers become visible. Only then do your processes really speed up significantly.
Of course not everyone needs a login. As I said: The cleaning lady doesn't need access. But everyone who is actively involved in the business, they should be in there.
So, that's it. You've now set up your company and entered your employees. And remember: The more consistently your team uses Leadtime, the more benefit you get out of it. Full transparency. Visible levers. Accelerated processes.
In the next video we'll create your customers, so the organizations and their employees. That's going to be exciting!
And our video about the data importer, you'll find that in the video collection with our help videos.
So: See you soon!
