If you need some help with signing up for a free trial of Deputy please read:

Creating an Organisation and Getting Started with a Free Trial

When you sign up for a free trial of Deputy, we will ask you some questions about your organisation and your needs such as "What best describes your business?"

Please click on the Other category and select Construction from the drop-down menu.

Note: if you signed up previously and want to log in again to continue setting up your account, please go to once.deputy.com and use the login details emailed to the address you used to sign up for the trial.

After signing up for your free trial, your first location will already be added for you.

You can add another new location by clicking Add Location. You can further update your location address and other settings by clicking Edit Settings.

You may create any number of new locations as necessary. Alternatively, once you have one set up you may like to duplicate it to save time.

When operating a construction business, you may have multiple locations your team works from and can set up Locations as construction worksite address.

Be sure to set up each Location setting with the correct:

• Address
• Time zone
• Operating Days and Hours
• Location notes to help your team find or navigate the worksite.

Go to Locations > General:

For each location, you will be asked to create your first scheduling Areas.

In Construction these Areas might include:

• Provider
• Support
• Supervisor
• Front Desk
• Contract
• Painting
• Carpentry
• Driver

Areas are used to separate your team members into the categories most useful to you for scheduling.

You may add, delete or edit the Areas to create as many as you need in each Location.

Other settings you can configure in Areas include:

• adding specific training requirements for team members to be scheduled in the area
• nominated preferred team members to be scheduled in the area
• setting up the area to have a physical clock on address away from the location using site scheduling
• whether hours scheduled in this area count towards worked time.

After you create your first locations and areas you will need to add your team members on the People page:

There are a variety of ways you can add team members including:

• adding individually
• multiple add
• share an invite link
• file upload (such as from a spreadsheet)
• via an integration connection such as payroll or other business software such as Buildxact

When adding team members, it is not strictly necessary to enter their email addresses and phone numbers, however without at least an email address your team members will not be able to create an account with your organisation, meaning that they will not be able to login themselves via Deputy.com, or use the Deputy mobile app. For this reason, we recommend that your team members have an email address attached to their account.

If you do not want to invite your staff to the team yet, please toggle off the "Send Invitation Email" option. This will prevent your team members from logging in online unless you send the invitation.

If your team members do not have an email address or mobile phone number they can still be scheduled in Deputy but will have limited functionality.

You may come back to the People page at any stage and add more team members or edit the settings for the people you have already added. There is also a bulk update setting to make the same changes to multiple people at once.

Don't forget to set up your team member's pay rates, using Deputy's pay rate library and leave entitlements, if applicable.

Once you have added a location, scheduling areas and team members, you will be ready to start scheduling your team members into those areas at each location.

Before you begin scheduling, we recommend that you customise your settings first. You can access the scheduling settings for each location by going to your Locations tab, then click Edit Settings to the right of your location. Next, click Scheduling on the left. In your Scheduling settings, you may set options such as

• starting day of your week
• default shift and meal break length
• notifications
• approvals for swapping and offering shifts
• shift confirmation settings

When you have finished making changes, please click Save before you leave the page.

Scheduling functions in Deputy are quite extensive, so as a result, the subject has its own article. We recommend reading it to make the best use of everything available for you.

The Deputy Kiosk for iOS / Android Time Clock will allow you to create and maintain a dedicated time clock service onsite at your construction site.

You can download the Deputy tablet app from your respective operating system's stores (iOS App Store or Android Play Store). Once the tablet is set up in your location, you may not use it in another location unless you reset it, however, you may have multiple tablets in one location if necessary.

You may wish to set up Deputy to allow team members to clock in and out of the work location on their own mobile devices.

Once you have set the worksite address you can configure a setting to alert scheduling managers to team members that clock on or off away from the worksite location. The manager approving the timesheet will also see a warning on the team member's timesheet that they clocked on or off away from the worksite.

Use Smart Scheduling to make informed business decisions, ensure optimal schedule coverage with clear and accurate data-driven insights.

With Deputy, it is possible to utilise known metrics to create labor modeling rules or implement fixed task demand planning that ensures your schedule has the optimum level of team members to cover the anticipated workload.

For example, if you know a project has a certain number bricks to lay you can add this metric to the dashboard and then ask Deputy to schedule the correct number of team members to complete the job in the specified time.

From the Business Insights dashboard:

1. Add a new metric for your brick volume data

2. Enter your brick volume data metrics as actual or manager forecasted into the business insights dashboard.

3. Click on Labor model and then Add New Rule

4. Configure the rule for the number of team members you require in each area to cover the specified brick volume.

5. If you have a fixed task you can click on Labor Model then Add new task

6. Set the amount of time the task will take to complete, the date and time it needs to be completed and the area you require the team members to complete the task in.

7. Click on Run Labor model to calculate the required staff.

8. In Schedule you can click Auto build shift structure to create a schedule that provides the required coverage.

9. Then click on Auto-fill to have your team placed into shifts to complete the schedule.

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Extend Your Trial Period

How to Upgrade to a Paid Plan from a Free Trial