Get started (as a workspace)
Welcome to Operentra. A workspace is your company's private space on the platform — your employees, attendance, leave, payroll, and documents all live here, isolated from every other company.
This guide walks you through creating a workspace, activating it, signing in for the first time, and completing the dashboard setup checklist.
1. Sign up your workspace
Open the sign-up page and choose Create Workspace. You set up your organization and your own admin account in a single step.
The form asks for two groups of details:
Company
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Company Name | Your organization's name (2–255 characters). |
| Country | Pick from the list. This also sets country-specific defaults, such as your local tax and fiscal-year settings where available. |
| Currency | A 3-letter code (for example USD, AED, PKR). It is pre-filled from the country you choose, but you can change it. |
| Timezone | Detected from your browser and pre-selected. Change it if your team works in a different zone. |
Your admin account
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Your name as the workspace administrator. |
| Work Email | Your sign-in email. If this address already has an Operentra account (for example from another company), enter that account's existing password — the new workspace is added under the same account. |
| Password | At least 8 characters. Re-type it in Confirm to make sure it matches. |
Select Create Workspace to submit. Your workspace is provisioned with sensible defaults already in place — roles and permissions, email templates, leave types, shifts, salary components, and more — so you can start working right away.
The email address you sign up with becomes your workspace's first administrator (the super admin role), with full access to every module.
Your sign-in email identifies one account across the whole platform. The same account can hold memberships in several companies — with different roles in each — and a company switcher appears in the top bar whenever that's the case. Employees you add later don't type their sign-in email anywhere: it becomes the address their invitation was sent to (which may be a personal address, depending on your workspace's sign-in policy).
2. Activate your account
What happens next depends on how the platform operator has configured sign-ups. There are three possible paths:
Email verification (default)
You see a Check your email screen. We send a verification link to your address — open it to activate your workspace and sign in. The verification link:
- lands on a confirmation page and finishes activation automatically, and
- expires 24 hours after it is sent.
If the email does not arrive, use the Didn't get it? Resend email button on the pending screen to send a fresh link.
Operator approval
If the platform operator requires manual approval, you see an Awaiting approval screen instead. Your workspace has been created, but it stays inactive until the operator approves it. You will get an email the moment it is activated, and you can then sign in.
Both gates can apply together. In that case you verify your email first, and your workspace then waits for operator approval before it goes live.
Instant activation
If neither gate is enabled, your workspace is activated immediately. You are signed in automatically and taken straight to your admin dashboard — no email step required.
If you land on a Signups are closed screen, the platform operator has temporarily stopped accepting new workspaces. Existing accounts can still sign in.
3. Your free trial
Every new workspace starts on a 14-day free trial so you can explore the full product before choosing a plan. You can review plans at any time from the Plans & pricing link on the sign-up and login pages.
4. First login
Once your workspace is active, sign in with the email and password you registered. After signing in you land on the admin dashboard at /admin, the home base for managing your company.
The admin sidebar has a Search menu box — press Ctrl K (⌘K on Mac) from anywhere to jump to it. It searches every page you can open, by name and by common synonyms ("payslip" finds Salary Slips, "gdpr" finds Data & Privacy), labels each result with the section it belongs to, and only ever shows pages your role has permission to open. Move through results with the arrow keys, open with Enter, close with Escape.
If your account belongs to more than one company, signing in lands you in the company you used last — click the company name in the top bar to switch to another one.
Everything personal about your sign-in lives in My Account (/profile), opened from your avatar menu in the top bar: your own profile, your employment history across companies, and the Sign-in & Security tab where you change your password and sign-in email. These belong to your account, not to any one workspace.
Your employees sign in to their own self-service area — the employee portal at /portal — but only after you have created their records (covered in the checklist below). Each new employee record with an email address triggers an invitation that lets the person activate their account and choose a password.
5. Finish setting up your workspace
The first thing you'll see on the dashboard is a card titled Finish setting up your workspace. It is a guided checklist that tracks your progress with a live "X of Y steps complete" counter and a progress bar.
The card:
- checks each item automatically against your workspace's real data, so a step ticks off as soon as you complete it;
- never blocks you — it is guidance only, and each step has a Go button that takes you to the right screen; and
- can be dismissed with the × button, and disappears on its own once every step is done.
The 8 setup steps
| # | Step | What to do | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Complete your company profile | Add your logo and address — they appear on payslips, letters, and contracts. | /admin/company/profile |
| 2 | Set up departments | Organize your people into departments. | /admin/company/departments |
| 3 | Add job titles | Define the roles (designations) your employees can hold. | /admin/company/designations |
| 4 | Create a salary structure | Define how a salary splits into basic, allowances, and deductions for payroll. | /admin/payroll/structures |
| 5 | Add a company bank account | Needed to disburse salaries and generate the bank payment file. | /admin/company/bank-accounts |
| 6 | Add your employees | Create employee records to run attendance, leave, and payroll. | /admin/employees/create |
| 7 | Review your public holidays | Accept the suggested holidays for your country so attendance and payroll skip them. | /admin/holidays/suggestions |
| 8 | Run your first payroll | Process a payroll run once employees and salary structures are ready. | /admin/payroll/process |
Public holidays for your country are fetched automatically, but they arrive as suggestions awaiting your approval — they are not on your calendar until you accept them. Until then, the system treats those dates as ordinary working days: shifts set to auto-present will mark everyone present on a public holiday, and payroll will count it as a normal working day.
This step ticks off once your holiday calendar has at least one holiday for the current year. The sync runs per year, so review it again each January.
Each employee you add starts as New (Pending Activation) — visible as an amber badge — and is left out of payroll, attendance, and leave until activated. Activation happens when the employee's employment contract is accepted (in the portal, or by uploading the signed copy): assign a salary structure, create the contract from it, and get it signed. The employee's profile shows the exact steps remaining. See Employees for statuses and activation, and Contracts & HR letters for issuing the contract.
Some steps may already show as complete right after sign-up, because your workspace ships with starter departments, job titles, and salary components. Review those defaults and adjust them to match how your company actually works.
Suggested order
Work through the checklist top to bottom. A practical sequence is:
- Fill in your company profile (logo and address) so documents look right from day one.
- Confirm your departments and job titles.
- Set up at least one salary structure and add your company bank account.
- Add your employees — this is what unlocks attendance, leave, and the employee portal — and activate them (salary → contract → signature) so payroll and attendance actually include them.
- Review your public holidays before attendance starts accumulating, so the calendar is right from the first day rather than needing correction later.
- When people and pay are in place, run your first payroll.
Once the checklist reaches 8 of 8, the card retires itself and your workspace is fully operational.
What's next
- Add and manage people from the Employees area at
/admin/employees. - Invite your team to the employee portal at
/portalonce their records exist. - Explore payroll, attendance, leave, and the other modules from the admin navigation.