The four setup steps

What each of the four screens after your first sign-in asks for, and why it matters.

The first time you sign in, HoursEasy walks you through four short steps before it lets you into the app proper. Only the last two — your first project and inviting your crew — can be skipped; each step is exactly what your organisation needs before it can do the thing you bought it for — step 3's own form, for instance, won't create a project at all unless at least one role on it has a rate. Here is what each step asks, and why.

Step 1: When does your week start?

Confirms the timezone the sign-up form guessed, and asks for your pay period. Every day and week boundary in the product is computed in your timezone, so getting it wrong puts an early-morning start on the wrong day — and in the wrong pay period. You can change both later from Business settings, but changing the pay period there moves which weeks your crew's phones keep on hand for working offline, so treat it as a correction, not something to experiment with.

Check Timezone — it is a guess from your browser, so confirm it rather than trust it.
Choose Pay period: weekly or fortnightly.
Give The period starts on a real date a pay period actually started on.

Step 2: What do you call the people who do the work?

Names the one role, Field worker, that every organisation starts with. Roles are what a project's rates are set against and what prints on the works summary a client receives, so leaving the placeholder means every rate line on every project reads "Field worker" on a document a client sees. See a project's rate table.

Put a real name in Your main role — Field Surveyor, Plant Operator, whatever your crew actually is.
Add any others under Any others, one per line. You can add more later.

Step 3: Your first client and project

Creates a client, a project and the project's rate table in one form. This is the step that lets the application do anything at all.

Fill in Client and Project.
Leave Project number blank to take the next in your own sequence, or type over it if the client issues their own.
Put an hourly rate against at least one role.

That last field matters more than it looks: this form creates nothing at all — not the client, not the project, not the rate table — until at least one role on it has an hourly rate. That is stricter than the product is once the project exists: your crew can record hours against it regardless of pricing, and what an unpriced role actually blocks later is sending the invoice, not the recording. More on pricing a project, and what an unpriced line blocks, in a project's rate table.

Step 4: Invite your crew

Sends a sign-in link to everybody you list.

List addresses under Email addresses, one per line — either just the address, or Sam Bowles <sam@example.com> to set their name at the same time.
Choose Their role for everyone on this list.

Every invitation starts out using a seat, not a login — see seats and what you pay for. Paste in more people than your plan allows and the invitations already sent stay sent — you are told to change plan on the billing screen, then add whoever is left from Staff. More on resending a lost link and what the Access column means is in inviting people.

Still stuck? Email hello@hourseasy.com. All help articles