Setting up your business — the first 10 minutes

After registering, you are signed in straight away and land in the setup wizard. It has four steps plus a finish. Only the first one is mandatory. You can set everything else to “Do later” — the item then does not disappear, but shows up again on the dashboard.

What to have ready beforehand

• The full company name, exactly as it should appear on the payroll documents.
• The federal state of your head office (because of the public holidays).
• Your industry — it determines the suggestions for premiums and terms.
• If available: the usual weekly working hours of your full-time staff.

Nothing more. Staff numbers, wages and contracts can be added later.

Step by step

1. Business (about 1 minute, mandatory). Enter the name, industry and federal state. The federal state is the most important piece of information in the entire setup: from it, Zeitflex automatically calculates the statutory public holidays for all 16 states. A wrong federal state means that public holiday premiums are calculated on the wrong day.
2. Working hours (about 2 minutes, optional). Create a working-time model, for example “Full-time 40 hours” with the distribution across the weekdays. You can create several models and assign people individually — full-time, part-time and mini-job side by side are the normal case, not a special case.
3. Premiums (about 2 minutes, optional). Choose the template for your industry. Zeitflex then sets the usual rates for night, Sunday and public holiday work. You can change each rate individually.
4. Team (about 3 minutes, optional). Invite your first colleagues by email. This can also be done later and at your leisure.
5. Done. The finish shows you three concrete next steps — not a list of what you have already done.

The result: your business exists, the public holidays are in place, and you can clock in straight away. Everything else is fine-tuning and can be changed retroactively.

Where to change this later

You will find everything from the wizard again under Settings:

Common pitfalls

• “I don't see any premiums.” Premiums are included from the Starter plan. In the free plan, working time is recorded, but no premiums are added.
• “My federal state has a public holiday that Zeitflex doesn't know.” Zeitflex calculates the statutory public holidays of all 16 states. Purely regional holidays (such as Corpus Christi only in certain municipalities) and company days off are not statutory public holidays and are not set automatically.
• “I cancelled the setup.” No problem. The next time you sign in, it continues where you left off.

Need more help?

Continue reading at Inviting employees or The first clock-in. If you are bringing existing data from Excel or another program, start with Importing data.