You're off to a great start! This guide is designed to help get your account up and running—so you can start inviting your team to their new favorite planner. 🙌 We’ll show you how to customize your team's settings, add default work hours and leave policies, and create people roles based on your team structure.
Let's dive in!
You'll learn to:
✔️ Customize your team settings
✔️ Set up capacity management
✔️ Invite your team to Float
✔️ Add your projects
1. Customize your team settings
You can access team settings if you’re an Admin or an Account Owner. Here, you can see the unique details of your Float account including your team name, URL, and notification settings for keeping your team updated. Only Account Owners can manage the billing and integrations settings.
To do ⚡
✅ Check your team's name and URL
✅ Set up your team's schedule and time tracking reminders
✅ Connect any workflow tools, e.g. Slack
2. Set up capacity management
You want Float to become your team's single source of truth for capacity. Adding your team's default work hours and leave policies standardizes your team's setup, which makes it easier to customize anyone individually later. These settings will automatically apply to all full-time employees.
Let's quickly get your team's default capacity set up.
2.1. Set standard work hours
In the Hours & currency tab, you can customize your team's default working hours and days. These are the hours that will appear as available for being allocated work on the Schedule.
To do ⚡
✅ Select a default timezone for your team
✅ Set your team's default working days and hours
2.2. Add your team's leave policies
We're advocates for taking time off to support a #bestworklife. By adding your company's leave policies, your team can see their accrued and remaining leave balances throughout the year. You can also automatically import and customize the local public holidays that appear on your Schedule.
💡 Time off approvals are automatically 'on' for all new Float accounts. This means that team members can schedule their own time off in Float, with managers needing to approve each request.
To do ⚡
✅ Add and edit your team's time off types, e.g., paid time off, personal leave, and parental leave
✅ Set balances and policies for each leave type, e.g., 20 days of paid time off granted upfront
✅ Select the local public holidays that apply to your team to add to the Schedule
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Create your own team holidays
You can create your own unique team holidays to add to the Schedule. For example, at Float, we have an all-team holiday week offline. We add this as our 'No FOMO Week' public holiday that shows everyone as unavailable for the last five days of the year.
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3. Invite your team to Float
Seeing your team in the Schedule is an exciting milestone to getting set up—and for taking a people-first to planning work. Ready to invite your team? Let’s do it!
There are two types of team members in Float: scheduled users and guests.
- People (or scheduled users) are your team who appear on the schedule. Any person on the Schedule can be allocated work with customized access rights (more on that below).
- Guests are those who don’t need to appear on the schedule, but they can view and make edits to it. Examples of guests are finance people who want to access reports or project managers who schedule work for their team.
Let’s go over how to add these types of people in Float.
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Pricing plans tip
Float plans are a pay per scheduled user. Guests are unlimited and can be added free.
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3.1. Add people
People includes everyone who needs to be visible in your Schedule for allocating work. Once your team is added, you'll be able to begin scheduling time allocations for projects right away.
To do ⚡
Add a person and set their:
Info:
✅ Name and email address
✅ Role
✅ Department
✅ Tags, e.g. skills and location
✅ Type, e.g. employee, contractor, or a placeholder (perhaps for a new hire)
✅ Hourly rate
Access:
✅ Access type, e.g., Team Member, Manager, or Admin
Manager permissions are customizable, so you can select who they can see on the Schedule, e.g., everyone or departments, and who they manage, e.g., people and/or projects.
Availability:
✅ Individual default availability
Full-time people will be preset to your team's default work hours and location. You update their public holidays region, e.g., mine is set to Attica, Greece, whereas my manager's is NSW, Australia. For people that aren't available for the default (full-time) capacity, you can update their part-time hours directly.
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Inviting your team later on
When you set a person's access rights, they are automatically invited to Float as long as their email address has already been added. If you prefer to delay inviting your team, you can add their email addresses later when you're ready.
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Add your team's roles, not job titles
Whereas job titles can vary, the roles required for teams' project work are often consistent. Setting up your people by using standardized roles makes it easier to make any bulk changes to your account. Even better, it will enable you to take full advantage of project estimation and planning features coming soon to Float. 🔥
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3.2. Add guests
All Float plans allow for unlimited number of guests—free! Guests are the people who need access to Float but are not expected to be allocated work.
Let's add them.
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Bulk importing people
Want to import multiple people in one go? You can do this via uploading a CSV file or, if you’re an Account Owner, through utilizing an integration with another tool, such as Zapier.
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A brief overview of access rights
We've designed flexible access rights so that you can pick the people and project permissions you want to provide edit access to. You can assign access rights as:
1. Admins, who can manage all people, projects, and team settings. They have almost the same permissions as the Account Owner, except for access to billing and integration settings.
2. Managers, set as people and/or project managers, with:
2.1. People Managers, able to manage assigned individuals or entire departments, and/or,
2.1. Project Managers, able to edit and manage as many projects as they are assigned.
3. Members, who can see their allocations, request time off and log time.
Guests can also be assigned a billing access right, which gives them permission to manage the account's billing and subscription details. It’s essentially a lighter version of an Account Owner.
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Align on your team's access rights
Check out our support guide that will help you understand what roles and permissions are available in Float. You'll want to assign access rights based on how your team works to get your team aligned and more managers planning better—from day one!
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4. Add your projects
Your team's allocated time is always associated with a project—so adding a project in Float is a great way to start to play and get familiar with the Schedule. If you find yourself getting the hang of things quickly, you can start to save your favorite projects as templates.
To do ⚡
Add a project and:
✅ Assign a client
✅ Add relevant notes or tags
✅ Set any important project milestones
✅ Set a budget by hours or fees and determine whether this work is billable, non-billable, or if it's tentative
✅ List high-level project tasks
✅ Add team members who will be working on this
Note: Just like with team members, you can also import your projects via a CSV file or integration. Find out more.
Great teams plan for success
Setting up your default settings and mapping out your team's roles, skills, departments, and hierarchal structure in Float is an essential first step to better planning. Getting your data inputs running on autopilot today will give you more insights to make informed resourcing decisions for tomorrow.
You're on the right track—let's keep going!
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Join a live training session with Q&A
Every week we host live training sessions with a Float expert. Each session is interactive and includes open Q&A.
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