User manual & FAQ

AuditSchedule is a tenant-specific planning workspace for internal audit teams. It combines people, projects, allocations, leave, holidays, travel, events, conflicts, approvals, analytics, capabilities, permissions, settings, and billing into one live scheduling system.

Use the left navigation. Your visible menu is permission-based, so it only shows modules your organization role can view. The main modules are Grid, Overview, Events, Dashboard, Approvals, Conflicts, Travel, Leave, Capabilities, Manage, and Settings.

Access is controlled by base role and named organization role permissions. A module can be view-only, editable, or hidden. Some modules can also be scoped to All, Team, or Own records, which limits what a linked user can see or change. Admin-level users normally have broad access; custom roles can grant or remove view and modify rights per module.

Billing now lives inside Settings as a Billing tab. Users with billing permission also see a lower-left billing status row. If billing becomes overdue or blocked, the workspace directs users to Settings so billing can be fixed.

Yes. The Guided Tour link in the sidebar opens a setup checklist that walks you through getting a workspace running: customize settings, upload people, upload projects, bulk allocate, fine-tune allocations on the grid, and grant access. Steps unlock in order, and each one tracks live progress from your real data (for example how many people or allocations exist) so you can see how many steps are complete. An "Explore further" section adds optional tours for Events, Travel, Leave, Capabilities, Approvals, Conflicts, and Dashboard.

Each Guided Tour step links into the relevant page and starts a short tooltip walkthrough that highlights the key controls in place — for example where to upload people, how the five Bulk Allocate steps work, or how to edit dropdown options and color defaults in Settings. Use Back, Next, and Done to move through a walkthrough, or close it at any time. They are launched from the Guided Tour rather than shown automatically on every visit.

Yes. A round help button with a robot-reading-a-book icon sits in the bottom-right corner of every workspace page. Open it to ask questions about how AuditSchedule works in plain language; it is an AI assistant that answers from this manual and, when relevant, offers a button to jump straight to the right page. Because it relies on your own role, it explains where a feature lives rather than promising you can access it, and it does not change any of your data. If it cannot answer something, it points you to the Feedback button or a workspace administrator.

Use the Feedback button at the bottom of the left sidebar. It opens a short form for sharing suggestions, questions, or issues with the team. It is available to every signed-in user regardless of role.

Click your name near the bottom of the sidebar to open My Profile. It shows your person card (team, role, location, access role, and active status), your current, upcoming, and past projects and events, your recorded skills and certifications, and summary stats — projects, man-weeks, leave days, holidays, and travel trips — for a date range you choose. If your account is not yet linked to a person record, the page asks an administrator to link it under Manage > People.

Rows represent people and columns represent time. Project pills show scheduled allocation, leave badges show time away, holiday styling marks public holidays, travel icons show planned or confirmed trips, event pills show organization events, and red cells indicate over-allocation conflicts. Amber cells are conflicts that were accepted on the Conflicts page; hover one to see who accepted it and when.

Use the layer toggles to show or hide Projects, Leaves, Holidays, Travel, Conflicts, Events, and Notes. Group people by project, director, team manager, or location, then sort by name, location, team, or role. The Roles filter narrows the grid to people in the roles you select (tick multiple); its starting selection comes from Settings > View Defaults. You can also show inactive people and allocation percentages.

Turn on the Notes layer toggle (next to Events) to show note markers in the grid. Anyone who can view the grid can add a note: hover a person and period cell, click the note icon, write the note, and choose who can see it — everyone with grid access, specific people, and/or people in particular roles. A small chat icon appears in cells that have a note. Open the note to read it and exchange comments with anyone who has access. Only the note author can edit the note text or change who can see it after it is posted. Any recipient can close a note (closed notes switch to the closed color set in Settings > Color Defaults); only the note author can delete it. The Notes button in the left sidebar opens a panel listing every note available to you and shows a badge with your open-note count. The open and closed marker colors are configured in Settings > Color Defaults > Notes.

Month view gives the annual plan, week view gives near-term scheduling detail, and day view gives the most granular availability picture. If work-week filtering is enabled in Settings, day view can hide non-working days across allocations, leave, holidays, and travel.

Allocations can have phases such as Planning, Fieldwork, and Reporting. When an allocation created at one granularity appears in another view, it is shown with the configured inherited-allocation style so planners can tell it came from a coarser or different time level.

Users with Grid modify permission can edit cells directly. Multi-select mode lets editors add allocations, apply a phase, or remove allocations across multiple cells. The percentage field controls the amount of capacity assigned to the selected project and period.

Users with Proposals modify permission can submit proposed grid changes instead of changing the plan directly. The proposal form supports project, percentage, phase, and team. Users can edit or cancel their own pending proposals from the cell modal. Depending on role settings, allocation adds/removals, phase-only changes, or team-only changes can require approval or be auto-approved.

Yes. Users with Approvals modify permission can click pending proposal pills in the grid and approve or reject them from the popover. The standalone Approvals page remains the best place to compare old and new values in detail.

The Legend is dynamic. It explains project colors, allocation phase styling, conflict styling, event styles, travel icons, holiday styling, and leave styling using the organization color defaults configured in Settings.

Overview is the high-level timeline view for projects and events. It offers a Gantt-style view for schedule shape and an Outlook-style calendar view for calendar inspection.

Own-scoped Overview shows the linked user only when that person record is a Director. If the linked person is not a Director, the page explains that the overview is not available for that account.

Toggle Projects and Events, filter by project type when available, filter by director, and navigate by year. Default hidden project categories come from Settings, but users can change visibility during a session.

Use Overview to understand project and event timing at a glance, then use Grid to inspect who is assigned, how much capacity is allocated, and whether leave, holidays, travel, or events create availability pressure.

Events shows organization-level activities in month, week, day, and Outlook-style calendar views. It is useful for leadership meetings, training windows, audit committee dates, reporting milestones, or other context that should sit beside the project plan.

Use the month, week, and day buttons at the top, or drill in by clicking a period header: in month view click a month header to open the full year of weeks scrolled so that month sits at the left edge, and in week view click a week header to zoom into that weeks days. The arrows step through years. Clicking an event name or colored bar opens the event details instead of drilling.

Yes. Use the Group control to organize the calendar rows into collapsible sections by Category (the default), Director, or Attendees, and click a section header to collapse or expand it. The Sort control orders the events by Date, Category, Director, or Attendees, both within each section and overall. Grouping and sorting apply to the month, week, and day views; the Outlook view is unaffected.

Events can target attendee groups such as Everyone, VP, Director, Team Manager, Manager, and Assistant. The Events page and Grid event layer can filter by those groups so each audience sees the relevant planning context.

Yes. In any calendar view, click an event name or its colored bar to open its details. If your organization role has the events modify permission, the panel opens as an editable form for name, code, category, dates, color, pattern, director, contributors, visibility, and active status, and you can also delete the event; view-only users see the same details as read-only. Saves and deletions apply immediately and are recorded in Manage > Change Log.

Events are managed from Manage under the Events tab, and existing events can also be edited directly from the Events calendar by clicking an event. Event records can include name, code, category, dates, color, director, contributors, visibility, pattern, and active status.

Dashboard summarizes total man weeks, projects with allocation, allocated people, average allocation per project, monthly allocation trends, project totals, person totals, planning stats, total travel per person, and travel locations.

Filter by year, project categories, project types, directors, people roles, teams, allocation phases, inactive people, and whether leaves or public holidays should be excluded from capacity. Charts and tables update from the same filtered dataset.

Exclude leaves or holidays when you want project workload converted to available working capacity. Include them when you want raw allocation weeks without absence or public holiday adjustments.

Yes. Settings > View Defaults includes Dashboard defaults for excluding leaves, excluding holidays, including inactive records, and hiding selected project categories or project types by default. Users can still change filters during a session.

Approvals lists pending allocation proposals submitted from the grid. Each row shows person, project, period, action, percentage, phase, team, proposer, submission date, a grid shortcut, and action buttons.

Search or sort the table, review the requested add, change, or delete action, then approve it to apply the allocation change or reject it to keep the existing schedule. Changed values show old values struck through and new values highlighted. Use the grid shortcut to inspect the period in context.

A conflict is a person-period where total allocation exceeds available capacity. The Conflicts page groups those issues so planners do not need to scan the whole grid manually.

Switch between week and month views, filter by role or person name, and use the grid shortcut to jump directly to the conflicting period. The table shows total percent, overage, and the allocations that caused the issue. Accepted conflicts are hidden by default; turn on the Show accepted toggle to include them.

Users with conflict modify access can remove an editable allocation directly from the conflict row, split multiple editable allocations equally, or accept the conflict as intentional. Aggregated day allocations still need to be edited in the grid.

Accepting marks an over-allocation as intentional: the conflict is hidden from the default list and no longer counts in the sidebar Conflicts badge, and its grid cells turn amber instead of red. In week view Accept covers that week; in month view it covers every conflicting week of that month. You can add an optional note, and the accepted row shows who accepted it and when. Turn on Show accepted to review accepted conflicts and use Un-accept to reopen one. If the allocation total later grows beyond what was accepted, the conflict automatically reappears as active.

Travel records planned and confirmed trips by person, project, location, date range, status, purpose, and notes. Travel appears in the grid and dashboard so planners can understand travel load and availability.

Yes. Editors can add or edit travel with person search and selected tags, which allows one travel workflow to create or maintain records for multiple people. The Travel page can also filter by year, status, and one or more selected people.

Planned travel is tentative and useful for forecasting. Confirmed travel is committed and should be treated as stronger scheduling context. The app uses distinct status badges and grid icon colors for each.

Leave tracks absences by person, date range, leave type, status, source, and notes. Records are grouped into readable ranges in the Leave page and appear as leave badges in the grid.

Import and Manual are leave sources. Import covers leave added via file upload or the API. Manual covers leave entered directly through the Leave page. Use the source toggles to show or hide each type.

Manage includes a leave import wizard for .xlsx and .csv files. Download the template, upload the completed file, validate rows, preview errors, and import valid rows. Date ranges are expanded to individual days and non-working days are skipped unless configured otherwise.

Yes. Manage > Leaves includes an error report email and an API key panel. Editors can generate or revoke a leave API key, copy it once, download a Windows upload script with the leave template, or use the documented curl pattern to validate or import files programmatically. Three endpoints accept the key as a Bearer token: GET /api/[org]/leaves/people returns active people with their emails (used to build the file), GET /api/[org]/leaves/leave-types returns configured leave types, and POST /api/[org]/leaves/upload?import=true imports a completed file. API imports are logged as API import and set the leave source to Import. Keep the key private because it can import leave without a user login.

Yes. The Leave table can be sorted by date, person, type, status, source, or notes. Imported leave is read-only in the Leave page, while manually entered leave can be edited or deleted by users with modify access.

Capabilities has Skills and Certifications tabs. Skills track person, topic or area, experience level, and interest. Certifications track person, issuer, certification, issue date, and expiry date.

Search by person, topic, or certification and filter by topic, level, interest, or issuer. Users with modify permission can add, edit, and delete skills or certifications; view-only users can use it as a staffing reference. Own-scoped Capabilities limits the Skills tab to the linked person record.

Manage is the operational data workspace. It contains People, Projects, Access, Events, Holidays, Leaves, and Change Log tabs. It powers the planning views, filters, permissions, and audit trail.

People records include name, email, team, person role, city, country, color, and active status. Active people appear in planning by default, while inactive people can be included with filters for historical or future review. A person record can also be linked to a user account so Own-scoped permissions know which records belong to that user.

Projects include name, code, category, type, color, start and end dates, director, team manager, and active status. These fields drive grid display, Overview timing, grouping, filtering, dashboard analytics, and default color rules.

Bulk Allocate is a five-step wizard: select projects and a date range, split each project into phase date windows (a default percentage split with per-project overrides), pick people per project and choose each person's role, set an allocation percentage per role and phase, then review before creating allocation records. Alongside the built-in director, team manager, and contributor roles you can define your own roles (e.g. Backup Team Manager) in Settings → Bulk Allocate, where you also set the default phase split and the percentage matrix. Allocations are tagged with the matching phase, existing allocations can be skipped or overwritten, and phase windows plus people-and-role picks are saved for the next run. Review the result because generated allocations still need planning judgment.

Each upload wizard provides a template, accepts completed Excel files, validates rows, previews valid and invalid rows, and imports only valid rows. People upload supports teams, roles, city, country code, colors, and active status. Project upload supports categories, types, dates, director, and team manager.

The Holidays tab groups public holidays by country, supports country search, date filtering, manual add/edit/delete, collapsible country groups, and a sync flow that can include extra countries.

The Change Log records key create, update, delete, approve, and reject actions, including role changes, role definitions, API key events, imports, and proposal decisions. Where available, it stores old and new values so reviewers can see what changed.

Manage > Access has Users and Roles sub-tabs. Users assigns email addresses to named roles, links users to person records, removes access, and can set a password or email a temporary password to an existing workspace user. If the temporary password email cannot be delivered, an error is shown and the user's password is left unchanged, so the action can simply be retried. Roles defines named permission sets with module-level view and modify rights. System roles cannot be modified, while custom roles can be created for your organization.

Base access is the broad role level, admin or member. Module permissions decide whether a role can view or modify each product area. Scoped modules can be set to All, Team, or Own, and proposal roles can choose which proposal types auto-approve. The left navigation and API access both use these resolved permissions.

Own and Team scope are available for Grid, Overview, Proposals, Conflicts, Travel, Leave, and the Skills side of Capabilities. Both use the user account linked in Manage > Access to a person record: Own limits access to that person only, while Team limits it to everyone sharing that person's Team (set in Manage > People). If no person is linked, scoped pages may show no records or block writes until the link is fixed; if the linked person has no Team, Team scope behaves like Own.

For roles with Proposals modify permission, admins can choose whether allocation additions/removals, phase-only changes, and team-only changes auto-approve. Auto-approved proposals are applied immediately and written to the Change Log; other proposals stay pending for Approvals.

Sync People creates or updates user access rows from people records that have an email address, links each user to the matching person record, and assigns the default member role where needed. It reports synced, linked, already complete, and skipped-no-email counts. It is useful after bulk people uploads or email cleanup.

Your signed-in name and resolved organization role appear at the bottom of the sidebar. Your name links to My Profile, and Sign out ends the current session. The sidebar footer also holds the Feedback button, the Manual FAQ, the Guided Tour link (for users who can view Manage), and, when permitted, the billing status. A separate help assistant button sits in the bottom-right corner of the page.

General settings control the organization name, workspace URL slug, working days, and whether day view hides non-working days. Changing the workspace URL changes the /org/... address, so old bookmarks and shared links stop working, and other signed-in users may need to sign out and back in.

Dropdown Options define selectable values used across the app: teams, people roles, project categories, project types, event categories, event attendees, leave types, leave statuses, capability topics, capability levels, interest levels, certification issuers, and certification names. Admins can add, remove, reorder, save groups, or rename values; supported renames update existing records that use the old value.

Color Defaults control project color rules, event color rules, event and phase fills or patterns, holiday styling, leave status styling, and inherited allocation styling. Defaults can also be applied to existing projects or events where supported.

Terminology lets authorized users rename key labels such as Director and Team Manager. These terms appear in project forms, event ownership, grouping controls, filters, dashboards, grid labels, and upload templates.

View Defaults set the starting state for grid, timeline, and dashboard views. Grid defaults include visible project categories, visible people roles, default grid view, grouping, sorting, holiday display, inactive people, percentage display, and layer visibility for projects, leaves, travel, conflicts, events, and notes. Dashboard defaults include leave and holiday exclusion, inactive records, and default visible categories and types.

The lower-left status shows the current subscription state: trial days left, active billing, scheduled cancellation, overdue payment, canceled billing, or not started. It links to Settings > Billing when your role can view billing.

Billing shows seat count, estimated monthly or annual total, subscription status, trial end, renewal or access end date, invoice history, and payment method. It can start card checkout, start invoice billing, open the Stripe portal, and show checkout success or cancellation messages.

Invoice subscriptions use the configured net payment period. If an invoice remains overdue after the grace period, the workspace can be blocked until billing is resolved. Billing-blocked users are routed to Settings so payment can be fixed.

The app includes an organization-scoped export route for major planning data, including people, projects, allocations, leaves, travel, events, proposals, holidays, changelog, and settings. It is intended for audit review, backup, analysis, and migration support.

From Manage, admins see an "Export for analysis" button in the top-right corner. It opens a small dialog where you pick a date range, then downloads a multi-sheet Excel (.xlsx) workbook for that range. Unlike the raw data export, this is a denormalized, analysis-ready workbook: foreign keys are resolved to names and it opens with About and Data Dictionary sheets that explain the domain and every column. It includes People, Projects, Project Phases, a denormalized Allocations fact table (with man-weeks), a computed Capacity & Utilization sheet (working days, public holidays, leave, available vs allocated man-weeks, utilization percentage, and over-allocation), an Allocation Heatmap shading each person by month from idle through fully booked to over-allocated, a native stacked-column Allocation Chart with its editable Chart Data sheet, a Skills Matrix, Certifications with expiry, Time Off, and Travel. It is built to drop straight into a pivot table or be handed to an AI assistant to answer questions such as who is over-allocated and when, which projects consume the most man-weeks, or where skill gaps exist. Admin-only.

No. The in-app help assistant only receives the message you type into it, together with the product manual it answers from. It never sends your organization's workspace data — people, projects, allocations, leave, travel, capabilities, or any records — to the AI provider, and it is read-only, so it cannot see or change your data. Messages are processed by our AI sub-processor (Anthropic) purely to generate a reply. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, inputs and outputs sent through the API are not used to train their models, and they are deleted within 30 days by default. Anthropic is listed as a sub-processor in our Privacy Policy.

The public site links to Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Cookie Policy pages. The app uses strictly necessary authentication/session cookies and shows a first-visit cookie notice with Accept analytics / Decline options. Accepting sets one optional first-party analytics cookie so visitor counts are more accurate; declining keeps measurement fully cookieless. Either choice is remembered and can be changed by clearing cookies.

The public site has a What's New changelog page listing product releases with their dates and a summary of new features, improvements, and fixes. This is the product-wide release history; for changes made inside your own workspace, use Manage > Change Log instead.

Check project date ranges, active people, linked user/person records, role permissions and scopes, default filters, leave and travel records, event visibility, and color defaults. After bulk uploads, auto-allocation, approvals, API-key imports, or syncs, use validation results and the Change Log to confirm what changed.