How to set the workspace up, and how to use it day to day.
Rankform keeps track of absences: annual leave, sick leave, business trips and work from home. It counts days by your company’s own rules, so set the rules up first and add people second.
You need three things: submit a request, see your own days and read the team calendar. That is sections 10–12, about five minutes.
Go to requestsSections 3–9: offices, public holidays, absence types, entitlements, people and rights. The order matters, and it is set out in section 3.
Go to setupThe workspace has six sections: Home — my days and my requests, Team calendar — who is away and when, Requests — the approval queue, Team — people, Settings — the rules, Analytics — the numbers.
Which sections you see depends on your role: employee, manager, administrator or owner. The table is in section 9.
There are two ways into a workspace.
You give an email address, confirm it from the message we send and go through the wizard: profile, team, a data check, day entitlements, accrual. After that the workspace is ready to use.
In the Team section an administrator sends an invitation by email, with the role and the office already set. The person opens it, picks a password and lands on their own Home.
No email? Check the spam folder and the spelling of the address. If it is not there either, write to us and we will send it again.
Eight steps. The order is not cosmetic: each one builds on the one before.
Holidays belong to a country, and a country belongs to an office: with no offices there is nowhere to put them. A day entitlement belongs to an absence type, so types come before entitlements. And rights are granted to people, so they come after the people themselves.
From step three on the workspace is already usable: the rest refines the calculation rather than switching it on.
An office is the city a person works in. It decides two things: which public holidays are not taken out of their leave, and whose calendar they see first.
Settings→Offices→Add an office
Offices created from the import file come without a country: the template has an “Office” column but no “Country”. Open such an office and pick the country, or it will use the wrong public holidays.
The workspace does not invent holidays: you add them, and each one belongs to a country.
Settings→Workspace holidays→Add a holiday
| Date | Name | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 27 Apr | King's Day | Netherlands |
| 26 Oct | National Day | Austria |
| 27 Dec | Company day off | All offices |
A type is what a person picks in a request. Each type has four properties, and those properties drive the calculation.
Settings→Absence types→Add a type
| Property | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Deducts from balance | Days are taken from the yearly entitlement and show up in the balance. | Annual leave — yes. Sick leave — no: it is not capped by an entitlement. |
| Manager approval | The request has to be approved by a manager or an administrator. | Leave — required. Work from home — often not. |
| Absence or work | Whether the person is away or simply working elsewhere. Affects only the absence rate in Analytics. | Business trips and work from home are work. Leave and sick days are absence. |
| Colour in the calendar | The colour of the bar in the team calendar. | Use different colours for types that often overlap in time. |
Colleagues do not always see the name of a type: the calendar shows only leave and work from home, everything else appears as “Another type of absence”. That keeps sick days or family matters between the person, their manager and whoever decides on the request. This is a platform rule; if your company needs it to work differently, write to us.
How many days a person is owed, when those days appear, and what happens to them at the end of the year.
How many days a year the type gives. For the whole company it is set on the type itself; for one person it is set in their card in Team, where it overrides the company-wide figure.
Days can appear all at once on 1 January or monthly — a twelfth of the entitlement on the first day of each month. The method is chosen in the wizard and changed in Settings.
| Unused days on 31 December | What happens to them |
|---|---|
| expire | They expire: a new entitlement is granted on 1 January. |
| all carry over | They all carry over into the next year. |
| some carry over | No more than the stated number carries over, the rest expires. |
The working week is set for each person individually, in their card. A request counts only that person’s working days: for someone on a four-day week, Friday is not taken out of their leave.
A request draws days from the year it starts in: leave from 28 December to 5 January comes out of December’s entitlement.
People can be added from a file, by invitation or by hand, and the three can be mixed freely.
Team→Invite
The manager is set in the person’s card. They see their own reports whatever city those people are in, and approve their requests; the approval queue rests on that.
When someone leaves the company, give them an end date: they drop out of the calendar after it, the history stays, and the seat in the subscription is freed.
A person’s email address is their login: the invitation and the password email both go to it.
There are four roles: employee, manager (someone with reports), administrator and owner. The last two run the workspace.
| What | Employee | Manager | Administrator and owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team calendar | |||
| A colleague’s reason for absence | |||
| A colleague’s remaining days | |||
| Approval queue | |||
| The Team section | |||
| Workspace settings | |||
| Analytics |
visible · partly · not visible
A single section of the tool can be opened or closed for one person, in their card in Team.
A request is created from Home with the “New request” button.
Only that person’s working days count. Weekends by their working week and the public holidays of their office drop out of the period, and half a day counts as 0.5.
The person’s manager decides; with no manager it is the administrator or the owner. A decision can carry a note, which the person who made the request will see.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Waiting for a decision. The days are already reserved on the balance. |
| Approved | Approved, the absence stands in the calendar. |
| Rejected | Rejected, the days went back to the balance. |
| Cancelled | Cancelled after approval; the days went back. |
A request you withdrew yourself is removed from the list: that is a correction, not a decision. If a manager cancelled the absence, the row stays, so that you can see what happened. A submitted request cannot be edited: withdraw it and create a new one.
Who is away and when — on one screen.
| Person | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emily Roberts | ||||||||
| Thomas Weber | ||||||||
| Sophie Bakker |
Switching the office changes nothing in your data; it is only a filter on the view.
Numbers for whoever plans: how many days are still unused, how often people are away, and whether the queue is stuck.
| Number | How to read it |
|---|---|
| Unused days | How many days the team has not used yet. These are future absences, not savings. |
| Absence rate | Absence days divided by available working days. Types marked as work (business trips, work from home) are left out of it. |
| Bradford | The number of separate absences squared, multiplied by the number of days. The measure deliberately makes frequent short absences “heavier” than one long one: ten one-day absences give 1000, one ten-day absence gives 10. |
| Queue | How many requests wait for a decision, and the longest wait in days. |
An office can be picked at the top — every number is then recalculated for it. “Whole company” also shows the split by office.
The “Excel” button exports a report of three sheets: the summary, the people, and charts with an explanation of the measures.
The workspace is paid for by seats: every active person in the team takes one.
Profile menu→Subscription
The ones we are asked most.
Weekends by your working week and the public holidays of your office drop out of the period, and half a day counts as 0.5. The details are in section 10.
The name is shown only for leave and work from home. Every other reason is visible to the person, their manager, and whoever decides on the request.
The combined view belongs to the administrator and the owner. An employee looks at offices one at a time, starting with their own: that way the calendar answers “who is around me” instead of listing a hundred and fifty rows.
Usually someone has no office set — those people are in the “No office” entry and in Settings → Who is in which office. The second reason is an end date in the past.
Holidays belong to the country of the office. If the offices are in different countries, that is how it should be; if they are in one, check that the country is set on both.
Team, Settings and Analytics belong to the administrator and the owner. The owner changes a role in the person’s card.
No. Withdraw it and create a new one — so that the history holds no request that once meant something else.
Check the spam folder and the spelling of the address, then send the invitation again — that is done by the workspace administrator. If that does not help, write to us.
Use the “Forgot password” link on the sign-in screen and we will email you a link to set a new password. If it does not arrive, check the spam folder.
To make pages open instantly the platform keeps a copy of the workspace data. Reload the page fully: Ctrl+R on Windows, ⌘+R on macOS, or pull the screen down on a phone.
