Set up your workspace

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Register

Go to app.squadbear.com/register. Registration runs in three steps: Your details (name, work email, and a data region - EU or US, which cannot be changed later - or continue with Google or Microsoft), Secure your account (a passkey or a password), then Create your workspace (a name and a country; the URL slug is derived from the name and editable behind Customize workspace URL). The country seeds the workspace's public-holiday calendar and resolves holidays for anyone with no country override on their profile. Changing it later at Settings → General seeds a calendar for the new country when one is prepared. The data region stays where you left it; see Security, data residency and GDPR.

See what registration created

Registering applies your country's leave preset - leave types, the allowances they count and a Standard policy for each - with the Simple manager approval workflow, a General work project, the joiner and leaver processes, and a holiday calendar (a prepared set for 27 countries, Poland among them; empty elsewhere). You, and everyone who joins later, are added to every Standard policy that adds new hires.

Creating the workspace opens the setup guide: three steps in order - Invite your team, Give people paid leave (the one required step: until someone is in a policy of a paid leave type, nobody can book paid leave) and Choose who approves leave - each with a short explanation and a link to the page where you do it, plus the defaults the workspace was created with (region and calendar, standard workweek, default project, starter leave types). The guide does not tick steps off; it is a list of instructions. Following a link shows a Back to setup guide bar on that page.

Admins reopen the guide from Setup guide at the bottom of the sidebar, just above their name (on a phone, in Menu, above the account rows). When you are done, choose Mark setup as done - the guide's main button, or the sidebar entry's ... menu - and the guide leaves the menu for every admin. The toast offers Undo, and Settings → General carries a Setup guide row with a Show the setup guide again button.

Find a page in SquadBear explains the grouped menu, the Team calendar shortcut, and navigation on phones and tablets.

Review the leave setup

Settings → Leave → Leave types lists what the preset seeded. A country without a preset of its own gets the generic one: Vacation (20 days a calendar year, up to 5 unused days carried over, half-day steps, Simple manager approval), Sick leave (nothing counted, Granted at once, manager notified) and Unpaid leave (nothing counted, unpaid, Simple manager approval). Their Standard policies add new hires, so everyone can request all three from day one; a type's Policies and members tab moves people or marks them Not eligible.

The Holiday calendars tab on the same page shows the calendar. A country with no prepared set gets an empty one, and requests exclude no public holidays until you add dates.

Invite your team

People → People → Add employee sends an invite; Settings → General → Verified email domains claims your company domain against a squadbear-verify= TXT record, so Google Workspace sign-ins join without one. Invite your team to SquadBear covers both paths, the invitation link's lifetime and the join queue.

Worked example

Northlake is a 15-person product studio in Warsaw. Marta, the founder, registers with Poland as the country, so the Polish preset loads nine leave types, Urlop wypoczynkowy among them, and 28 Polish public holidays for 2026 and 2027 load into the calendar. Everyone has an @northlake.io Google account, so Marta claims that domain and switches auto-join on instead of sending 15 invites. Each joiner lands in every Standard policy except Dostępność B2B, which is for contractors and assigned by hand.