🛠️Set up your workplace

This page describes how to create your Zipwire workplace which represents your company or organisation.

Kicking the tyres

People trying out Zipwire with a few friendly colleagues can follow this guide. We recommend you use your real Workplace details but set the teams, assignment and client up as something like 'Test'.

You can test Zipwire out on your own but you must have three completely separate logins, e.g. two Microsoft accounts and a Google account.

We recommend you use multiple devices or browsers as you will need to act out the roles of the sender, approver and processor as different people. It is possible to log out of Zipwire and log back in as the "other person" but it's easy to get confused and have a bad time.

Feel free to reach out to [e-mail] and we can play along as one of the roles if that's helpful.

Step 1: Choosing your role

For strangers arriving on the Zipwire homepage and following the Get started free links and other calls to actions, you'll first be presented with options to choose what role you'll be playing in Zipwire.

The freebird option will register you as a new user but will not take you down the workplace creation route. This is because individual senders rarely want the features for managing many freelancers.

Choosing either approver or processor will take you down the workplace setup route. This simple onboarding flow will not only setup your workplace, but also your first assignment and the client who it is with.

Step 2: Inviting your team

The onboarding process will collect information about the name of your workplace, its domains for email (the part after the @ sign), and the industry its in.

Invites will be sent out to anyone added during this workplace onboarding flow.

You'll be presented a UI through which you can add your teammates. If you chose approver in the previous step, then these will be fellow approvers such as team deputies, and for processors this will be colleagues in a payroll team.

When adding colleagues, it's expected that these people will have work email address on the domain of your workplace.

You'll then have the opportunity to invite people to the processors team (if you're an approver) or approvers team (if you're an approver).

Step 3: Adding senders

You can manually add senders, or upload a list of them all if you're feeling brave, and this upload function is also available later.

For people testing Zipwire, you probably only want to add one or two members of the team to act as freelance workers.

Step 4: Final checks and naming things

The final step will recap the members of the approvers and processors teams, and all the senders. You can go back and fix things.

We recommend changing the names of the assignment that will be created and the client.

There'll be a short delay in setting this up as we write many changes to the database and fire out all the invites.

Final configuration is done within the assignment UI

You'll land on the assignment manager page "within" Zipwire proper. At the top will be some alerts to highlight that you've still got work to do before everything is setup.

At this point your workplace is setup, invites have gone out and workflows have been assigned to senders.

The things needing attention are the billing plan, rate plan and workplace invoicing.

Go into each one and configure them as you need.

You may also wish to add some assigned activities so that senders can quickly add time against this work. This is optional and senders can add their own activities in their journal and link this work to the assigned workflow.

Customize your workplace branding

Your workplace is setup and ready but you should set your brand's color and a URL pointing to its logo.

You workplace branding is used on timesheets as a small touchpoint. Zipwire also places a virtual business card on everyone's dashboard.

The card has a contact name and address. You can set these on the assignment manager page.