Getting started with Aboard

Your dedicated contact person has provided you with a document to complete with your employee data, which we will import into your Aboard account.

Please take a moment to watch the accompanying video—it explains what information is essential in the document and outlines the details we can import. Once you have filled in the required data, kindly inform your contact person so we can proceed with the import process.

While we import your data, you can start setting up your platform by following the steps outlined below.

Let's take a closer look at your company settings. Please watch the video provided—it offers a clear, step-by-step explanation of how to set up your company settings. Below, you'll find a helpful summary outlining what each setting does and how it benefits your organization.

Employee birthdays:
Choose if you want employees’ birthdays to be visible to their colleagues.

Add your workplaces and offices. Later, your employees will be connected to a specific workplace and office, ensuring everyone is correctly associated with the right location. This step not only personalizes your HR system but also allows you to filter and run reports on data points connected to these workplaces, giving you valuable insights into your operations.

Start off by clicking + New workplace in the top right to add a new workplace:

Add your departments. Just like with workplaces and offices, your employees will later be connected to a specific department. This not only helps you organize your team structure more effectively but also enables you to filter and run detailed reports based on departmental data, ensuring your HR system is both efficient and tailored to your organization’s needs.

Start off by clicking + New department in the top right:

This setting allows you to further organize your company and set up who will have access to what, making sure that your managers are able to manage efficiently and that no unauthorized access is had to the employees within your organization.

Let's start off by clicking + New team in the top right corner, this will bring up a box allowing you to choose the name of the team as well as an emoji and color accompanying the team:

Now that your first team is created, we can start choosing who will be able to do what in this team.

If click on to the team you will be greeted with a view of the leads and the members of the team in question.

To explain it simply, leads are the ones that will have some sort of access to the different members that are in the team.

As your team was just created, this will be empty so let's start off by adding a lead to the team by clicking the + add lead button:

When adding a new lead, we must first choose who the new lead will be.

Clicking the drop down menu under Profile will bring up the employees within your organization that have a role as Admin or Manager in the system.

Keep in mind that you can technically add as many leads as you want to a team and have them differing in access levels, the only requirement for a lead to be added to a team is that they have the Admin or Manager role in Aboard.

We then get to choose the access level of our new lead, you have three options here with a varying amount of access:

Profile visibility

Basic info

Employment

Can:

Can not:

Includes all Viewer abilities as well as -

Can:

Can not:

Includes all Trusted Viewer abilities as well as -

Can:

Cannot:

Now that we have a lead, we can add some members that the leads will have access to, start off by clicking the + Add member when viewing the team.

You will then be brought to the list of all of your employees, here you simply check the boxes on the left side for the employees you would like to add to the team followed by clicking Actions and then Add to Team:

And we're done with creating our new team!

Good job 😊

Here you can simply add new job titles to your organization. These can, like departments; be added to employee profiles after they've been created to have more concise organization and clarity in your platform.

Allow your employees to share their ethnicity details. This enables you to generate insightful diversity reports that support your commitment to an inclusive work environment and help ensure compliance with legal requirements in some regions.

First activate the feature by switching Ethnicity fields to on, after that you can simply add any ethnicities:

Set up skills for your company by first creating categories—such as languages, system knowledge, and more. Once these categories are established, you can easily assign the relevant skills to your employees.

Mapping skills in your organization offers several benefits:

This simple setup helps you maintain a transparent overview of your team's competencies, making it easier to support growth and drive success.

To start setting up our skills, we would first need to add a Category that we can then add Skills in to.

The categories can be whatever you want and think is most relevant to your organization, some popular examples would be to have Languages, Management level, Coding languages etc.

Once you have a category and some skills set up, you can start applying these to your employees.

Simply go on to the employee in question and scroll down a bit under Profile to find Skills, click the pen to edit/add skills as well as set 1-5 level of said skill:

Set up the certifications you'd like to monitor and invite your employees to submit them. Our system will notify you as each certification nears its expiration, ensuring you stay informed and your team remains up-to-date.

Like some of the previous settings, you can add a new one by clicking in the top right, you then get to give the certification a name, emoji and color as well as a description if you want.

Dashboard widget for certification alerts

Enhance your dashboard by adding a widget that kindly reminds you when certifications are nearing their expiration. This personalized feature helps you stay on top of important deadlines, ensuring your team’s credentials remain current and compliant.

If you want to learn more about the dashboard widgets, have a look here!

Once a certification is added to your workspace, we can add it to an employee by going on to their profile > documents > + to add the certification:

Choose which certification you would like to add and then click Create:

Once the Create button has been clicked, the employee will get a request on their side. They will then be able to add the document needed for the certification as well as a "valid until" date, this date is what will be showing up in your Expiring certifications widget mentioned previously.

Employee documents settings allow you to add categories for the documents added directly to the profiles of your employees.

When adding a new category you get to choose the name of the category, an emoji and color as well as the level of privacy that should apply to the category.

You will have two options here:

Once the category has been set up, you will find it under Documents when viewing an employee profile. In this view, you'll be able to see which documents are in each category, if the documents in that category will show for the employee as well as a little + sign to add a new document to the category.

In employee IDs you can choose to activate custom employee ids which might be more relevant if you already have set employee ids that will accompany the rest of the information when importing data in to Aboard.

You also have the option to create a new number series and customize that with:

Name

Prefix

Format

Suffix

You of course also have the option to leave this alone completely if that suits your organization better 😊.

The time off feature allows your employees to request time off directly through the portal or mobile app. Once approved, these requests will be accessible in reports, providing valuable insights for payroll administration, time off analytics, and more.

💡 Read more about Time off and how it works here: Time off settings

Add your time off policies along with their settings so they can later be assigned to your employees. You also have the option to import these policies via a file; however, it’s very important to ensure that each policy name is spelled exactly the same to avoid duplicates during the import process.

Each policy includes its own customizable settings and rules, designed to handle automatic calculations. This streamlines processes and reduces the administrative workload for you.

Add in your local public holiday calendar, which will then be taken into account when your employees book time off.

Your calendar will automatically include the public holidays for your chosen country or location. We understand that each organization is unique, so you're welcome to customize your calendar further by removing or adding public holidays as needed. This ensures your calendar perfectly reflects your specific schedule and requirements.

Once you have your Public Holidays set up, they will show up and be choosable when adding a new employee (or editing an existing one).

Here you can set which onboarding template should be your default template.

To actually create an onboarding template, click the "Onboarding" button in the top menu or the "hamburger menu" also found at the top.

If you want to know more about setting up an onboarding or creating the templates, have a look here!

Here you can set which offboarding template should be your default template.

To actually create an onboarding template, click the "Offboarding" button in the top menu or the "hamburger menu" also found at the top.

If you want to know more about setting up an offboarding or creating the templates, have a look here!

Time tracking helps you monitor work hours across projects. Add managers who can create projects and assign team members. This feature must be activated before it becomes available to your team.

Once your time tracking managers are added, you'll be able to set up projects and assign them to your employees. As your team logs their time on these projects, you'll gain valuable insights through an intuitive overview and detailed reports. This approach is designed to simplify project management and help you make informed decisions, ensuring a smoother and more efficient workflow for everyone.

The expense reporting feature in Aboard allows employees to submit expense reports for business-related costs and enables administrators to manage, review, and reimburse these expenses. This feature streamlines the expense reimbursement process for your organisation.

Before we can start using the feature, we have to Activate it here:

To learn more about the feature and get a more thorough look at how to set it up, please have a look at the dedicated article here!

This is where you configure your company's whistleblowing settings. When activated, this feature enables individuals to submit anonymous reports—whether for internal or external matters—that you can manage with ease.

For data privacy, all information associated with a case will be automatically deleted two years after the case has been marked as closed.

Please note that legal limitations may apply regarding the types of issues that can be reported through your whistleblowing channel. We encourage you to review these regulations and adjust your matter categories and guidance for employees accordingly.

Create personalized, automated approval workflows that fit your company’s needs.

Select the appropriate team members to review and approve various requests, such as compensation adjustments, position changes, and time reporting updates. The system sends approval requests in a clear numerical order, ensuring a smooth process. Once a request is approved, the new information is automatically updated, reducing manual tasks and streamlining your operations.

Keep in mind that an employee has to be an Admin or Manager to be available as an approver.

Personalize your company's data retention settings to suit your needs. These retention periods will start from the date an employee is archived in Aboard.

You can set different durations for the following categories:

Choose from options such as keeping data forever or retaining it for 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 years. This setup helps you manage data efficiently and ensures compliance with your policies.

Easily log and track the reasons behind employee terminations and resignations using our intuitive settings. By recording these details, you gain valuable insights into workforce trends and can identify recurring patterns that might indicate areas for improvement. This not only helps in addressing underlying issues proactively but also guides you in fostering a more supportive and engaging work environment for everyone.

Profile attributes allow you to create custom fields for anything you'd like, whether it's for food preferences, business areas, collective agreement or any other organization-specific information that might be good to have, you can set it up here.

For a more thorough guide on how to get started and use this feature, please have a look at the dedicated article found here!

Profile completion allows you to keep track of what employees have a complete profile, enable/disable fields depending on what fields on the employee profile you find important.

Once the feature has been activated and you've set up the fields that you want, you can go on to an employee profile to see what is done/needs doing.

You will find a percentage, indicating how many of your chosen fields have been filled out, a progress bar to accompany this and purple dots indicating what sections of the employee information is missing:

Going on to the Details tab will allow you to see exactly what information is missing in each section easily by the purple Missing tag:

Don't forget that we have a support chat!

If anything feels unclear, you have feedback or simply want to talk to someone go ahead and reach out to us directly, we'd love to have you 😊