Adding Your Whole Team on Day One, and Making Sure They Actually Sign In

You have signed up on a Monday. You have forty people across three branches, a spreadsheet your accountant keeps, and a reasonable expectation that by Tuesday everybody will be marking attendance on their phone.

By Friday, twenty six of them are. The other fourteen are still being marked by hand, because their invite went to an address with a typo in it, or landed in a promotions tab, or arrived on Monday afternoon and was opened on Wednesday, by which time the link inside it had expired.

Nobody tells you about this part. Every attendance app has an import screen. Very few of them have an honest answer to the only question that matters a week later: which of my staff have actually signed in, and what happened to the ones who have not.

A staff list is not a workforce

There are two separate jobs hiding inside "add my team", and treating them as one job is why the second week goes badly.

The first is creating the records. Forty names, their branch, their department, what they are paid to do. This is the job every product builds an import screen for, and it is the easy one.

The second is getting forty human beings to open an invite, on email or on WhatsApp, and log in once. That is a delivery problem, a literacy problem and a chasing problem, and it does not finish on the day you press Import.

You also have a paperwork reason to get the list right rather than approximately right. The Code on Wages, 2019 requires every employer to maintain a register of the persons employed (section 50), and the India Code text of the Act is the version worth reading rather than a summary of it. A register assembled from whoever happened to install the app is not a register.

What the import has to get right on each row

A staff import is not one column of names. Each row carries a small set of decisions, and getting them in at upload time is the difference between a working system on Tuesday and four weeks of editing people one at a time.

Two of those are worth dwelling on. Language is the one owners skip and regret: a housekeeping team that reads Tamil will not use an English app twice, and setting the column at import costs nothing while changing it later means opening forty profiles. Geofence mode is the one owners get wrong in the other direction, putting everybody on strict for day one and spending week two on complaint calls from a site where the GPS drifts.

The template that already knows your branches

Most imports fail validation for a dull reason: the file was built against a blank template, so the branch names in it are the ones the owner uses in conversation rather than the ones typed into the app three days earlier.

So the template you download is not a blank header row. It is a spreadsheet built for your business at the moment you ask for it, with your locations and your departments already sitting in the dropdowns, which means a branch name cannot be spelled two ways.

If you would rather not download anything, select the cells in your existing sheet and paste them straight in. The paste is deliberately careful about one thing: if you highlighted twelve columns of data and left the header row behind, it will not quietly eat your first employee to use as column names.

Duplicate addresses inside the file are caught on the preview screen, before a single account exists. So is running past your plan's staff limit, and if that limit cannot be read for any reason the import stops rather than assuming you have unlimited seats.

Blank password, or a password you chose

One column changes the whole first day, and it is the one people leave alone without realising it is a decision.

For a warehouse or a housekeeping team, the second column is usually the honest choice. You are standing in front of them at the shift briefing anyway. Set a password, import, and walk the room getting people logged in while you are there. For an office team on their own laptops, the first column is better and safer.

Staff with no email: they sign in with their mobile number

A cleaner, a delivery rider or a kitchen helper often has a WhatsApp number and no email address they have opened in a year. Until recently the honest advice for them was the password column above and an afternoon of logging people in by hand. That is no longer the only way.

On the Employees page, Add staff takes one person at a time, and the email box can now be left empty. The form says so in plain words: no email, leave it empty, they sign in with their mobile number and Shiftelio sends their login on WhatsApp. Their WhatsApp number is what carries the login, so get it right.

The owner also has a Send logins screen, reached from the Employees page, that lists everybody against five plain steps: not sent, sent, link opened, joined, clocked in. From there you can send a reminder to one person, send a fresh link if an old one was shared, or post one message in your staff WhatsApp group, in which each person types their own mobile number and gets their own link back. A link sent from Shiftelio is limited to three a day per person, so a nervous tap on Send cannot flood somebody's phone.

Two limits are worth knowing before you plan day one around this. The spreadsheet import still needs an email on every row, and the import page says so: staff with no email are added one by one with Add staff. And the login goes to the person's own WhatsApp, so somebody who shares a phone with a relative, or uses the owner's number, needs their own number first. Shiftelio will not send a staff login to an owner's number.

The part everybody skips: did it arrive?

Here is where an import screen stops being enough.

Sending an email and delivering an email are different events, and the gap between them is where your fourteen missing staff live. An invite can be accepted by your mail provider and then bounced by theirs. It can be delivered and never opened. It can be opened three days later against a link that died after twenty four hours.

So every person you have invited sits in exactly one of five states, and you should be able to see all five on one screen:

The screen that shows this reads live delivery events back from the mail provider, so "delivered" means the receiving server accepted the message, not that we pressed send. You can resend to one person, or resend to everybody currently shown by whichever filter you are looking at, which is the point of filtering to the problem bucket first.

Stale links are flagged separately. If somebody was invited more than a day ago and still has not signed in, their link is dead whatever the delivery status says, and a resend is the only thing that helps.

People you added with no email appear on the same screen with a Mobile login tag instead of an email state, and no Resend or Fix email button, because there is no address to resend to. Whether they have signed in still shows beside their name. If you select a mixed group and press Re-send invites, the emails go out and the mobile-login people are skipped and counted separately, with a note that their login goes by WhatsApp from Send logins, rather than being reported as failures.

When an invite bounces

A bounce is not a mail glitch to be retried. It is a data problem, and resending is the one action guaranteed not to work.

Undoing a bad import

Everybody imports the wrong file once. Usually it is last year's sheet, or the same sheet twice.

Undo removes up to fifty of the accounts a single import created, and it refuses to remove anybody who has already signed in. That refusal is the important half. A bulk delete that will cheerfully remove somebody who has spent three days marking attendance is not an undo, it is a way to lose three days of attendance, and once payroll has read those days the loss stops being obvious for a month.

You are told how many accounts were skipped and why, grouped by reason, rather than handed a list of identifiers.

Who in the office should be allowed to do this

Adding staff and chasing staff are different desks in most businesses. The person holding the hiring paperwork is rarely the person with time to ring fourteen people about an email.

So the permissions are separate ticks rather than one. In Shiftelio the Employees feature is described to the owner exactly as it behaves: see staff profiles, add new people, edit their details, and chase the ones who have not signed in yet. Underneath that sentence, Add and Invite & chase are two different permissions, and so is Fix a wrong email, because changing the address somebody signs in with is closer to holding their account than to editing their job title.

One consequence is worth knowing before you set a role up: ticking Add on its own gives a manager the Invite button and no screen on which to see what happened to it. That is a manager who will tell you, honestly, that they invited everybody.

There is a third tick, Download the list, deliberately not implied by being able to view staff. Anyone who can open the screen can read a phone number. A spreadsheet of every phone number in the business is a different object, because a spreadsheet gets forwarded.

Which app runs the import and the chase together

One thing worth being specific about, because it is where most tools stop. Plenty of systems will tell you an invite was sent. Sent is our word for our own action. What you need on the Friday is the receiving server's word, per person, and somewhere to act on it without exporting anything.