Quick Start Guide

Welcome to EBS quick start guide. This guide will get you started with your EBS account in a few minutes by following 3 easy steps:

Setup your staff
Define your shifts
Work with the roster

Already done that? Looking for a more specific guide? Check out our help section for detailed guides on common tasks.

This guide assumes you are logged in. If you are unsure how to login to your account, check out our login guide. Also, we recommend you to cancel the email usage for the duration of this tutorial to avoid unwanted mails sent to your employees. This can be done through the "settings" link in the top right corner of the application.

Setup your staff

Positions and employees form the essential staff information needed to work with the roster so if you are eager to see the magic at work, you can skip the optional information (which is not specified here). You can always come back and read about it later.

The following steps are all under the "Employee Management" tab.

Define roles

Roles define the set of permissions each employee will have in the application. The Administrator role is a default role created in each account. This role cannot be modified or deleted and grants its holder all available permissions. The account creator gets this role and can grant this role on to others. Each employee can hold several roles.

Let's create a role for your employees:

Click on the "Roles" link
Click on the "Add" button
Name your new role (for example "Employee")
Click on the "Modify Privileges" button
Choose the following privileges:
- Generate Personal Reports - Allow the employee to generate personal reports
- Use Yellow Flag - Allow the employee to specify when he/she wants to work
- Use Red Flag - Allow the employee to specify when he/she doesn't want to work
- Use Shift Exchange - Allow the employee to offer his/her shifts to other employees
- View Full Roster - Allow the employee to see the entire roster
Save the role

Define Positions

Repeat the following steps for all of your available positions:

Click on the "Positions" link
Click on the "Add" button
Name your new position (e.g. "Waiter", "Nurse", "Clerk", etc.)
Save the position

Define Attributes

Attributes can either describe physical attributes (e.g. "Tall", "Caucasian", etc.), employee skills ("Speaks Italian", "Senior", etc.) or a needed duty that an employee can perform in a shift (e.g. "Clean store", "Stocktaking", etc.).

Define Activities

Activities describes what activity your employees are engaged in (e.g. "Work", "Sick Leave", "Holiday", etc.).

Define Employees

Each employee card holds a lot of information about a specific employee (most information won't be covered in this tutorial). Here are some important properties that helps the system run:

Email - Email is used both for login and for notifications, meaning that an employee without a defined email will not be able to login to EBS
Manager - Days off and shift exchange requests are by default sent to the employee manager who has the permission to approve those requests (respectively)
Roles, Positions and Attributes (under "Skills" link) - It is important to define those skills for each employee, in order for the roster to function properly and so that the employee will has some privileges in EBS

Define your shifts

Shifts are essential in order to work with your roster (rules are not).

The following steps are all under the "Shift Management" tab.

Define your shifts

Fill in the following properties: Name, Start Time, End Time, and skill quantities.

For example, you might have a "Morning Shift" that starts at 08:00 AM until 16:00 PM and in that shift you'll need: 1 Manager, 10 Waiters (you can define that 1 of those waiters must speak Italian...if you defined Italian in the attributes of course) and 3 Cooks (notice that the attributes are under each position).

"Rest Time" defines the amount of time needed for rest after occupying that shift (if you have a "Night" shift, this is a great way of making sure that your employees won't be scheduled for the morning shift the day after).

Define rules

Rules are set for 1 or more employees and define the way employees can use the roster and/or will be scheduled for shifts. Through the rules, you can set a priority for employee placements, define how many double shifts this employee can have, restrict the number of preferences the employee can set, define how many shifts (of each type or total) the employee can be scheduled for, and define permanent perferences for the employee.

Work with the roster

If you did everything right, you should be able to see the shifts you've defined with positions inside them in the roster view. By this point, the staff is defined and so are the shifts and all that's left to do is fill the roster.

At any point, you can manually fill the remaining slots or have it done automatically in a click of a button.

If this is your first time with EBS, read "How to use the Roster" before you continue.

Buttons

Go ahead and press the "wizard" button (second button to the left in the action buttons panel). In a few seconds you should be able to see the roster full. At this point, the placements are red, meaning that they are not published. You can play with the roster as much as you want and the employees won't see it until you decide to publish the roster (first button to the left).

Other buttons that are important to mention are the "clear" button (3rd button to the left) which enables you to clear all the placements (not preferences) and "revert" button (4th button) which enables you to restore published placements that you have cleared (marked in red with a line-through).

To see the roster of a specific employee, use the employee dropdown (in the right side of the action buttons panel).

Shifts

Double clicking on a shift will open the manual placements window where you can see all of your employees preferences for the shift and add or remove placements.

For more information on EBS, check out our Support Center.