Settings & Administration

The control centre where administrators configure how the whole organization works, from job titles and leave rules to who is allowed to do what, and the company's plan and billing.

Overview

Settings & Administration brings together all of the reference data and rules that power the rest of Workyla HRM: departments and job titles, leave types and policies, the public holiday calendar, performance review criteria, work shifts, the organization's own profile, its time zone, storage, and its subscription plan.

It also houses the Roles & Permissions screen, where an administrator decides exactly what each type of user is allowed to do, and it is where Super Admins can review the impersonation (support access) safeguards built into the platform. Most of these areas are limited to HR Managers and the organization's Super Admin; a few (like leave policies, billing, and time zone) are restricted even further.

Who uses it

HR Admins: Configure almost everything here day to day, including departments, designations, leave types and policies, the holiday calendar, performance factors, shifts, and, if given the permission, roles, billing, organization profile, and time zone.
Managers: Generally do not have access to Settings, unless a custom role has specifically been given one of these permissions.
Employees: Do not have access to Settings; they experience its effects (their leave balances, shift hours, holiday calendar, and so on) elsewhere in the app.

What you can do here

Departments & Designations

Maintain the list of departments used when assigning employees, on the employee directory, and in reporting — each can optionally have a head, a specific employee marked as its lead.
Maintain the list of designations (job titles) shown on employee records and used when adding new employees.
Add, rename, or delete entries from either list at any time.

Leave Types & Policies

Define the kinds of leave the organization offers (Annual, Sick, Casual, Compensatory Off, and so on), including whether a type is paid or unpaid, whether a reason is required, whether half-days are allowed, and whether it's currently open to apply for.
Changing a leave type's yearly day allowance automatically adjusts every current employee's allotted and remaining days for the year by the same amount; days already used or pending are left untouched.
Set annual leave entitlement per role and leave type, and choose whether it's released to employees all at once at the start of the year or unlocked gradually, month by month.
Override how many days a specific leave type releases in a specific month, per role, and manually trigger or catch up on a month's release.
Decide what happens to unused annual leave at year-end — compensated (settled through payroll) or carried forward into the next year, optionally multiplied — and run that year-end process for a chosen year.
Configure Compensatory Off: how many hours count as a half or full day, whether banked days expire, a monthly earning cap, and whether HR must review each claim or it's granted automatically.

Holiday Calendar

Maintain the company-wide list of public holidays and office closures, organized by year and shown on a visual monthly calendar.
Mark each holiday as Confirmed (locked in) or Expected (tentative); confirmed holidays factor into attendance and leave calculations right away.

Performance Factors

Maintain the list of criteria used in monthly performance evaluations, each rated on a 0–5 scale.
Add, rename, and reorder factors, and mark one inactive when it's no longer used — inactive factors are hidden from new evaluations but remain visible on past reviews.

Shifts

Define weekly work schedules: which days an employee works, what hours, and how many minutes of grace period are allowed for check-in before it counts as late.
Assign a shift to one or many employees at once, across one or many days, in a single action.
Set an organization-wide default shift that automatically applies to anyone who doesn't have a personal shift of their own.
Edit an existing shift's hours, label, or grace period for everyone on it at once, and see and resolve scheduling clashes before confirming a change.

Organization Profile & Time Zone

View and update everything the organization provided at sign-up: company details, addresses, legal identifiers, and billing contacts.
Set a single time zone for the whole organization, controlling date boundaries, attendance calculations, leave day boundaries, dashboards, and reports for every employee.

Storage & Billing

See how much of the organization's storage allowance has been used, and buy additional storage as a monthly add-on or one-time top-up.
View the current subscription plan, cost, renewal or trial date, and seats used against the plan's limit.
Compare available plans and move the organization to a different one, or open the billing portal — available only to those with billing permission.

Roles & Permissions

Every person holds exactly one role, either a built-in role (Super Admin, HR Manager, Management, Employee) or a custom role a tenant has created.
Turn individual permissions on or off for the built-in HR Manager, Management, and Employee roles — permissions are grouped by module (Organization, Roles, Employees, Leave, Attendance, Performance, Org Chart, Lifecycle, Policies, Announcements, Assets, Salary, Increments).
Create an entirely new custom role based on one of the built-in roles, starting from that role's current permissions or from a blank slate, then fine-tune exactly which permissions it holds.
Reset a customized built-in role back to its out-of-the-box defaults, or rename/delete a custom role (a role cannot be deleted while people are still assigned to it).

Impersonation / Support Access

Workyla's platform-level support team can generate a one-time, time-limited access grant that lets them sign in as a specific person for troubleshooting.
The moment such a session starts, an unmissable banner appears across the top of every page, naming the exact person being viewed as and stating that any action taken is recorded under that person's name.
A single Exit impersonation button ends the session immediately and returns to the login screen; nothing is restored to a previous session, since the supporter was never signed in as themselves on that device.

Step-by-step: Creating a custom role and assigning it

1Go to Settings, then Roles & permissions, and select Create role.
2Give it a name (for example, Payroll Officer) and choose which built-in role it is based on — this decides whose records its holders will see.
3Choose whether to start from that base role's current permissions or from none, then select Create.
4On the new role's page, tick or untick individual permissions across each module until it has exactly the access it needs, then select Save.
5Assign the new role to the relevant employee from their profile in Employees. They will now have exactly the permissions configured here.

How it connects to other modules

Departments, Designations, and Leave Types populate dropdowns used throughout Employees, Leave Management, and reporting.
Leave Policies and the Holiday Calendar directly drive employees' leave balances, what they can apply for, and how attendance is calculated.
Shifts and the Organization Time Zone drive attendance calculations everywhere in the app.
Roles & Permissions governs who can do what across every other module — Announcements, Leave, Performance, Assets, Salary, and more all check a person's permissions before allowing an action.
Billing and Storage reflect and enforce the limits (seats, storage) tied to the organization's active subscription plan.

Good to know

Settings is only reachable by people who can manage employees or manage roles. Specific areas inside it — billing, organization profile, time zone, leave policies — are gated by their own individual permissions.
Changes to leave policies apply going forward only; days already granted to employees this year are never taken back retroactively.
The Super Admin, the organization's owner, always holds every permission and can never have this changed — guaranteeing the owner can never accidentally lock themselves out.
A permission can only be handed to a role by someone who already holds that permission themselves, and nobody can edit the permissions of the role they themselves currently hold.
The base role a custom role is built on can never be changed after creation, and a custom role cannot be deleted while anyone still holds it.
An impersonation access grant can only be redeemed once, only for the account it was created for, and only while that account is active.