Set up your workspace

For a single hire, use Admin, Users, Add user: name, email, one or more roles (Employee, HR, Ops Head, Company Admin), and optionally the teams and squads they belong to. Calm Leave generates a temporary password and shows it to you once, with a copy button, so you can hand it over on a call if email is not an option.

Bring a CSV, XLS or XLSX file with up to 500 rows and columns for name, email, roles, team and squad. Only name and email are required, and a downloadable template keeps the columns in the order Calm Leave expects.

Team and squad names are matched case-insensitively against what already exists in your workspace, so a row that says engineering lands in the same team as Engineering. Anything new in the file is created on the spot. Squads need a supervisor: tag one row per new squad with SUPERVISOR in the roles column, and that person becomes its supervisor and gains approval rights automatically. Leave that row out, and the admin running the import is assigned instead.

A bad row, whether it is a typo in an email or a duplicate, fails on its own with a per-row report explaining why. The rest of the file imports fine.

Every new workspace starts with two leave types already configured: Annual Leave and Sick Leave. Most admins open this page to tune the numbers, not to start from a blank form.

For each type you control whether it is paid or unpaid, how many days it allocates, how many days carry over and for how many months, how it accrues (manual, monthly or yearly), an optional gender restriction, and whether a doctor's note style attachment is expected.

Every leave type gets a default workflow assembled from steps, and four step types cover almost every approval chain: Team Lead (every team lead of the requester approves), Squad Lead (every squad supervisor approves), HR (any one HR user approves), and Approver Set (a named group you define, where any member can approve).

All required approvers receive the request at the same time. Everyone must approve for it to go through, one rejection closes it, and a person who covers several steps at once only has to approve one time.

Approver Sets are how you model a custom approval group, like a payroll committee. Members carry the Approver role automatically for as long as they are in the set. Attach a workflow to every leave type that needs sign-off.

Rules apply to every leave type, or only the subset you pick. Edits collect on a draft policy version, and nothing changes until you publish it, which activates the new version atomically. A dry-run tester simulates a request against the draft before anyone is affected.

Add public holidays for the year one at a time, a date and a name, or apply the built-in US Federal Holidays preset for the year in a single click.

Company off-days cover ranges like an all-hands week, on top of public holidays.

Weekends, holidays and off-days never count against anyone's balance. The request form excludes them from the day count automatically, and shows how many were excluded.

Someone calls in sick and cannot log in to request it themselves. HR, Ops Head or Company Admin can file the leave for them from Admin, Leave on behalf: pick the person, the type and the dates.

It is created already approved, skipping the workflow.

The employee is notified in-app and by email, with the name of the admin who filed it, so nothing happens behind anyone's back.

You have imported your people, tuned your leave types, wired up approvals and published the rules that protect your calendar. Here is what a workspace ready to go live looks like.