Getting started & company setup

How setup works

Getting onto Hubtoll takes three short steps: create a personal login, confirm your email, then set up your company. After that, a handful of company-wide settings — your timezone, weekend days, offices, departments and holidays — become the backbone that leave, timesheets, appraisals and every other module rely on.

You only do this once. The person who creates the company automatically becomes its first administrator (a SUPER_ADMIN), with full access to everything.

Your setup checklist

From your first sign-in, the corporate dashboard (and the Human Resources dashboard) opens on a Workspace setup bar: a percentage, how many of the nine essentials are done, the one to do next with a button straight to its page, and View checklist. The checklist opens as a window over the page, so the dashboard keeps its room: the nine essentials in the order to do them — company profile, office locations, departments, public holidays, leave categories, the employee-records and leave approval workflows, your team, and their employee records. The one to do next is called out, and every step links straight to its page. Three of them are ticked from day one: your leave categories come pre-set; employee-records approval starts switched off, so you can add employees straight away and add sign-off steps in the workflow designer whenever you want a second pair of eyes; and leave approval starts with the chain most companies run — a request goes to the person's line manager (or to a workspace administrator when they have none), and the requester is emailed either way. Open it in the designer to reword the emails or add steps. Once everything is in place the bar says so and can be hidden; it returns by itself if something is later switched off.

The same figure sits in the header as a Setup 78% chip on every page until you are done — click it to open the checklist wherever you are. Below the essentials, Go further lists the optional extras (the asset register, timesheet deadlines, an appraisal cycle, payroll structures, custom roles); they never count against the percentage.

1. Create your account

Go to the sign-up page and fill in:

• First and last name.
• Account type — choose Corporate to run a company on Hubtoll. (Individual accounts exist but this guide covers the company journey.)
• Email. A corporate account needs a company email address — free webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com and the like) is not accepted for corporate sign-ups. The email box unlocks only after you pick an account type.
• Password. At least 7 characters, including upper- and lower-case letters, a number, and one special character.

Creating the account confirms you agree to Hubtoll's Terms & Conditions.

2. Activate your email

We email you an activation link the moment you sign up. Click it to confirm your address and switch your account on.

• The link is valid for one hour. If it expires, request a fresh one — activation emails can always be resent.
• For security, the link carries only a one-time token. If a temporary password was ever issued, it travels in the body of the email, never in a web address.

3. Set up your company

The first time you log in, a short wizard collects everything needed to create your company:

• Your details — country, state/province and phone number.
• Business profile — industry, company name (up to 50 characters), your subdomain, your weekend days, your timezone, and optionally a logo and your public holidays.

Finish the wizard and your company is live — you're taken straight to your dashboard as its administrator.

Your subdomain

Your subdomain is your company's private web address on Hubtoll — for example, acme gives your team acme.hubtoll.com. Choose it carefully:

• Between 3 and 13 characters, and unique across Hubtoll (if it's taken, you'll be asked to pick another).
• It's stored in lower case.
• Some names are reserved (such as www, mail, admin, app, api, support and similar system names) and can't be used.

You can change your subdomain later in company settings, but because it's the address your whole team uses, change it sparingly.

Company profile & settings

An administrator can edit the company profile any time under Corporate management → Profile settings. Editable details include company name, subdomain, industry, country, state/province and logo, plus two settings that matter a great deal:

Timezone

Your company timezone is the single authority for what counts as "today" and how every date and time is displayed across Hubtoll. It defaults to your browser's zone during setup. Set it to the zone your organisation actually operates in — deadlines, leave windows and appraisal windows are all judged against it, so a shared, correct zone keeps everyone in step no matter where they log in from.

Weekend days

Choose which days are your company's weekend (rest days). This drives leave and date maths everywhere — weekend days are skipped when counting leave and working out return-to-work dates. The default is Saturday and Sunday. You can pick any combination, but you can't mark all seven days as weekend — at least one working day is required.

Logo

Upload a company logo (JPG, JPEG or PNG, up to about 5 MB). It's optional, and if an upload ever fails it won't block the rest of your setup.

Office locations

Office locations describe where your people work. They're managed under Human Resources → Employee records → Office locations. Each location has:

• A type — Physical, Hybrid or Remote.
• An alias (a friendly name), plus country, state and address.
• A status — you can deactivate a location without deleting it.

You can add several at once, and enable, disable or remove them later.

Departments

Departments group your people for reporting, budgets and approvals, and are managed under Human Resources → Employee records → Departments. Create a department, then assign employees to it.

Public holidays

Add your company's public holidays under Corporate management → Holiday management (you can also add them during first-time setup). Add holiday opens a short form: a name, an optional description of what the day is about, the country it is observed in, when it is — one date range, so a single-day holiday is just the same date twice — and whether it is active. The description shows under the holiday's name on the list and wherever the day is explained.

• Holidays are plain calendar dates — a holiday declared on the 3rd is the 3rd for everyone, with no timezone shifting. There is no per-holiday timezone: your company's operating timezone is set once on your company profile.
• Every holiday belongs to a country (it starts as your company's own), and it applies to the staff who work in that country — the country of the office on their employee record. A company with offices in Lagos and Accra gives its Accra staff Ghana's holidays and its Lagos staff Nigeria's. Staff with no office follow the company's country.
• Leave calculations use the active holidays that apply to the person to work out accurate end and return-to-work dates. The Holidays calendar on your dashboard colours each country's days and shows which colour is which beneath it. A Countries picker above it opens on the country your office is in — or reads All Countries when your employee record has no office yet. Open it to search the list and tick one or more countries; the calendar then draws every ticked country's days, and the picker's × takes you back to all of them. Hover over a coloured day (or tap it on a phone) to see the holiday's name, its description when it has one, its country and its dates; where several countries share a day, each one is listed.
• You can switch a holiday off or delete it at any time (a delete asks you to confirm first). To correct a saved holiday, delete it and add it again.

Adding team members

Bring colleagues into your company by inviting them by email. Each member you add is given a licence seat at the same time — adding a member and assigning a seat go hand in hand (see Licensing & subscriptions).

• If the email belongs to someone new to Hubtoll, we create their account and send a welcome/activation email.
• If they already use Hubtoll, we send an invitation linking them to your company — no second account is created.
• You can resend an activation email to a member who hasn't signed in yet.

A member's name and email are their single identity across your workspace — an administrator keeps them accurate, and they stay in sync with the person's employee record.

Who can do what

Setup tasks are protected by permissions so only the right people can change company-wide settings:

Screens you don't have permission for are simply hidden. To learn how to grant these permissions to your team, read Roles, permissions & approvals.