Assign work to someone who has not joined yet

Somebody starts on the 14th. You know their name today. You are building the roster for the 14th today.

Most systems will not let you put them on it. They do not exist yet, because existing means having accepted an invite, set a password and logged in, and none of that has happened. So you write the roster with a gap, or with their name in a note, and you come back to fix it later. Sometimes you come back.

Where the gap actually bites

It is not only the roster. It is every list in the business that has a person in it, during the two weeks between hiring somebody and their first login.

• The recurring job that should move to them when they start
• The van, the laptop or the test kit being assigned to them
• The induction checklist that is meant to be theirs
• The first week of work somebody has already planned around them

Each one gets deferred, and each one is a small promise to remember something on a specific future day. That is exactly the kind of promise a busy week breaks.

Add them from wherever you noticed

The fix is to let a person be created from the place you were already working, rather than sending you to an admin screen and back.

In any picker that assigns a person, choose + Add team member at the bottom of the list. It is there on a recurring job, a visit, equipment, a task, a checklist template and any field that picks a person, on the web and in the phone app.

Type their full name and email, their phone if you have it, then pick their role, their location if you have more than one, and a team, and click Add and send invite. They are selected straight away, and the work you were assigning is theirs.

They show as pending until they accept, for example "Jane Smith (Pending)", so nobody reading the roster mistakes them for somebody who is already set up.

Pending, but real

The useful part is what pending means. They are not a placeholder or a note: they hold assignments. A job, a shift, an item of equipment or a task given to them is genuinely theirs, and when they accept, everything already assigned stays with them.

There is no second step where somebody reassigns a fortnight of work from a stand-in name to a real account.

What they hear in the meantime: nothing

This is the part worth getting right, and it is easy to get wrong. Somebody who has not accepted an invite gets no notifications about the work assigned to them. The invite is the only email they get.

Think about what the alternative would look like from their side. You have not started, you have not agreed to anything, and your inbox starts filling with shift changes and job assignments from a business you have not joined. It reads as a mistake at best.

So the planning happens on your side, quietly, and the first thing they see is the invitation.

Somebody who already uses the software

A person who already has an account elsewhere is a case worth thinking about before you choose a tool, because it is where several products leak data between unrelated businesses.

Here, they show by the name you typed, and you see nothing else of their account. Inviting somebody does not hand you their profile, their photo, their other employers or even confirmation that they are already a user. Their account stays theirs, and your company knows exactly what you typed into the form.

That restraint costs a small convenience and buys the thing that matters: nobody can learn about somebody's other work by typing their email into an invite box.

Somebody who works in your other company

If you run associated companies, + Add from another company is the other row at the bottom of the same pickers. It appears when your company is in a group and there is somebody in it who does not work here yet.

Search their name, pick the location they will work at here, a team and a role, and send the invite. You are not asked for their name or email, because both come from their own company. They keep their place there and gain one here.

Running two venues without switching companies covers the wider shape of that, including the one thing that needs no invite at all: a shift can be given to anybody in the group, because a shift is about somebody's time rather than about your records.

Who can do it, and the limits

Only an admin can add team members. Everybody else sees An admin adds team members in the same place, rather than no option at all, which tells them what to ask for instead of leaving them to guess why they cannot do it.

You can invite up to 50 people by email a day. If every seat you have bought is licensed, a new person is added without a licence rather than being refused, so the planning is never blocked by billing. Free a seat up or buy more under Admin, then Billing.

An invite link works once and expires in 7 days, and every link you make is listed under Invite links, where it can be copied again or deleted.

A better first fortnight

1. Add the person the day you know their name and email, from whatever screen you happened to be on.
2. Put them on the roster, the recurring jobs and the induction checklist straight away.
3. Assign their equipment before day one, so the handover is a conversation rather than an admin job.
4. Set their role and location as you add them, rather than fixing permissions on their first morning.
5. Let the invite be the only thing they receive until they accept it.

Roles are worth deciding before anybody joins rather than after: setting staff permissions by role covers doing it once instead of per person.