Learn which steps you need to take before you can import your employees into Personio.

What are the benefits?

Configuring the basics of your account is important for the following reasons:

• Adding company information and a logo personalizes Personio for your organization. The logo will be shown in the top-left corner of your Personio account and in email notifications.
• Configuring departments in Personio ensures that the correct full-time weekly hours are stored for each department. This determines an employee's full-time equivalent (FTE) value and salary calculations for part-time employees.
• Configuring your office settings ensures that the correct timezone, public holidays, and currency are stored for each employee.

Step 1: Set up general company information

To configure your general company information, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Organization > Company.
2. Click Edit.
3. Then fill in your company information and upload your logo.

Note
The selected settings for currency, timezone, and public holidays are the initial default values for a company but can be overwritten for each office.

Learn more about configuring your company information.

Step 2: Create departments and teams

Departments

Departments are used to set the full-time weekly working hours. This builds the base to determine an employee's FTE, and to define which employees work part-time to be able to calculate their salary accordingly.

To configure your departments, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Organization > Departments and Teams.
2. In the tab Departments, insert the department name in New department and click .
3. Next to your newly created department, click Edit and insert the weekly working hours of the department. By default, the Weekly working hours are set to 40 hours.

Tip
If the full-time weekly hours for your departments differ based on the employee's location, create separate departments to reflect these full-time weekly hours.

Example
John is based in the Sales department in the UK, where the full-time weekly hours for the Sales department are 37.5 hours. Louise is based in the Sales department in Germany, where the weekly hours for the department are 40 hours. In this case, two departments should be created in Personio:
Department 1 = Sales UK
Department 2 = Sales Germany

Teams

Teams give you the option to group employees in order to map complex organizational structures in Personio.

To create teams, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Organization > Departments and Teams.
2. In the tab Teams, insert the team name in New team and click .

Once you have imported your employee data, you can assign these teams to the corresponding employees via the employee list. The number shown next to the team name in the Teams tab indicates the number of active employees that are currently assigned to the team. Learn more about configuring departments and teams.

Step 3: Create offices

Each location where you have an office should have a separate office configured in Personio. This way, you can set up the address, currency, time zone, and – if necessary – a customized public holiday calendar for each office. To create an office, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Organization > Offices.
2. In the field New office, insert the name of the office that you want to create and click .
3. Next to the office name, click Edit and add the currency, timezone, address, and public holiday calendar.

Learn more about configuring customized public holiday calendars in the next step.

Step 4: Set up public holiday calendars

The correct and complete setup of the public holiday calendar is essential for the calculation of the absence balance. If you define a day as a public holiday in Personio, it is not calculated as an absence even if an employee requests an absence for that day.

Example
Your company has an internal rule that allows employees to work half days on December 24 and 31, in addition to the public holidays. These half days must be entered into Personio in your customized public holiday calendar. If an employee submits a vacation request for December 24 until 31, this will be calculated as only four vacation days, since the public holidays are not counted, or are only counted as half days (see image below).

If your company has multiple offices in different states, a separate public holiday calendar can be configured and assigned for each office. Learn how to configure public holiday calendars.

Note
Check if everything is set up correctly in Quality check: Account basics before moving on to the next module.