Getting started
Set up your company, add your people, and take the first punch — in order.
The first half hour, in the order that avoids rework.
1. Check your workweek and timezone first
Everything else is built on these two, and changing them later moves the boundaries that overtime is calculated against.
Go to Settings and confirm your timezone and which day your workweek starts. A California workweek is seven consecutive 24-hour periods starting on the same day and time each week — most employers use Sunday or Monday.
Paidsley records every punch as an exact moment and then converts it to your company's local clock to decide which workday and which workweek it belongs to. A shift that ends at 11:30 PM belongs to the day it started in your timezone, not to whatever date it happened to be in UTC.
2. Set your wage rules
Settings → Wage rules holds the switches that decide what Paidsley enforces: daily overtime, weekly overtime, the seventh-day rule, first and second meal periods, rest periods, premium pay, meal waivers, split shifts and reporting time.
The California defaults are already on. Company setup and rule toggles explains what each one does and when you would ever turn one off.
3. Add your people
Either add employees one at a time, or import a roster from a payroll export. Paidsley reads CSV and Excel files, including the Employee Codes report from ADP RUN.
Importing always shows you a preview of every row before anything is written. See Adding and importing employees.
4. Set a pay rate for everyone
An imported roster usually arrives without wages, because payroll exports tend to carry names and identifiers rather than pay.
Paidsley will refuse to finalise payroll for anyone recorded at a zero rate rather than quietly producing a zero paycheque. It is far easier to set rates before the first shift than to backfill them against punches that already exist.
5. Invite your team
Each employee gets a link or a QR code. They open it, enter their own phone number, and choose whether to accept text messages.
They must enter that number themselves — you cannot type it in for them. That is deliberate: consent to be texted only counts if the person gave it, and a number an administrator typed proves nothing.
6. Take one punch and look at it
Have someone clock in, take a meal break, and clock out. Then open Reports for that pay period.
You will see the hours, the regular rate, and any premium that was triggered. Doing this once, before it matters, is the fastest way to understand what your team will see and what payroll will receive.
A good habit: run a pay period end to end in Paidsley alongside your existing payroll for one cycle, and compare the two. Anything that differs is worth understanding before you rely on it.
Paidsley is built around California wage and hour law, and these pages explain how. They are not legal advice. Wage rules change, and how they apply depends on your industry, your Wage Order and your own agreements with your employees. If something here matters to a decision you are making, check it with your employment counsel.