Set up your workspace

This is the first thing to do after signing up — register a workspace, check what's already configured, and get your team into it.

Register

Go to app.squadbear.com/register. The flow is two short steps: your account (name, work email, password — or continue with Google or Microsoft), then your workspace (a name, a URL slug, and a country). The country matters more than it looks: it decides the workspace's default public-holiday calendar and where new employees inherit their country from, and it's used the moment you register — you're not just labeling the workspace, you're seeding it.

See what's already there

A new workspace isn't empty. Registering seeds three leave policies, a two-step approval workflow, and — if your country has a prepared holiday set (Poland does, today) — a filled-in holiday calendar. Your dashboard shows a Getting started card that tracks five steps against live state, not a checklist you tick yourself: workspace created, make the defaults yours, invite your team, turn on domain auto-join, and approve your first request. It disappears once everything's done, and an admin can bring it back from Admin → Workspace if it's dismissed early.

Review the leave setup

Admin → Policies lists what got seeded: Vacation (26 days a year, rising to 30 after five years' tenure, half-day booking increment, manager approval — admin too above five days), Sick leave (no cap, auto-approved), and Unpaid leave (1–30 days a request, manager approval). All three exist from the moment you register — adjust the numbers here rather than starting from scratch. Admin → Holidays shows the calendar; if your country doesn't have a prepared preset, it starts empty and you add dates yourself.

Invite your team

People → Manage people → Add employee defaults to Send email invite: the person picks their own name when they accept, the link is valid for seven days, and pending invites sit in a list below with resend and revoke actions. If your company signs in with Google Workspace, claiming your email domain (Admin → Workspace → Email domains) lets matching sign-ins join automatically instead of you sending invites one by one — or, with auto-join off, they land in a join-request queue an admin approves from the same page.

Worked example

Northlake is a 15-person product studio in Warsaw. Marta, the founder, registers a workspace and picks Poland as the country: it gets 14 Polish public holidays for 2026 pre-loaded, and the default Vacation/Sick/Unpaid policies are already active. Because everyone at Northlake has an @northlake.io Google account, Marta claims that domain and turns on auto-join instead of sending 15 separate invites — her co-founder and the rest of the team join the moment they sign in with their work Google account.