Employee Portal: shifts, time tracking & more

The Employee Portal is a dedicated, mobile view for your staff — separate from the admin area. Full team members log in with their own account, while external temp staff enter through a link without needing an account. Both see their shifts, log time, and handle tasks related to their assignments there.

Getting into the portal

There are two ways in:

1. Full team members with a login sign in to Univents as usual (email address + 6-digit code) and land automatically in their workspace's portal. For how to set this access up, see Set up & configure staff.
2. External temp staff without their own account get a personal link by email the first time they're assigned a shift. One click opens the portal directly — no login required. Their header shows a "Temp staff" label. This group only sees the operational areas: Shifts, Calendar, Tasks, Time tracking, Availability, Schedule, Kitchen, and Packing list. Pay, Vacation, Files, and Messages remain reserved for full team members with a login.

If a link has expired or been revoked, the page shows "This link is no longer valid" — the only fix is a new link from the team.

Keeping track of shifts

The Shifts tab lists every assignment with date, time, role/event, hours, pay, and status. Filter the list with All / Confirmed / Pending / Open. The Calendar tab shows the same shifts as a month or week view with a color-coded status legend and back/forward navigation.

Open shifts that don't match your skill profile aren't shown at all — if you see "No matching shifts," ask your manager about missing skills.

Accepting, confirming, or declining a shift

The available buttons change with the shift status:

Tapping a shift opens its detail page with the event, your contact person, colleagues on the same shift ("Working with you"), a directions link, and — if shared — the event's schedule.

Logging time and checking your balance

From the shift detail page you can check in directly: Check in now is only active within the check-in window; afterward you'll see Check out.

The Time tracking tab offers two ways to log time: the stopwatch (Start/Pause) or a manual entry (Event, Task or Shift, Start, End, break in minutes, Notes, Save) — this manual path is available both to full team members with a login and to temp staff using a portal link without one. Legal break rules are applied automatically and shown to you. Right below it, Time balance shows Worked, Target, Balance, and Carried over for the selected month, with month navigation. For details on how your team approves entries, see Time tracking & vacation management.

Working through tasks and asking questions

The Tasks area lists every task assigned to you — split into Overdue, Open, and Done. Clicking the box ticks a task off; clicking it again undoes that.

Below each task you will find a Comments area. Expand it to ask a question or leave a progress note — right on the task, instead of over WhatsApp and past the office.

• Your team reads along. What you write here appears in the admin area in the same thread on the same task, with your name in front. Customers and partners never see these comments.
• Everyone responsible is notified. If the task is assigned to several people, all of the others get a notification — plus a push notification if they installed the portal as an app. You do not get one yourself.
• You edit and delete your own. The pencil and bin icons only appear on your own comments. If you correct one afterwards it is marked as “edited”.

The area is available to staff with a login just as much as to temp staff using a portal link without an account.

Vacation, pay, and documents

These three areas are only available to full team members with a login:

• Vacation shows your yearly budget (Taken / Planned / Remaining). Use New request to choose a type (Vacation, Leave, Sick), a date range, and an optional reason. Requests start as "Pending" until your team confirms or declines them — if declined, you'll see the reason right on the request.
• Pay & hours shows the current month, your hours year-to-date, and a table per month with a PDF download of your payslip.
• Files lists documents shared with the team as well as private files — both downloadable.

Checking off and loading the packing list

Once the office has created the packing list for an event, the Packing list area appears in the portal — for team members with a login as well as temp staff on a portal link. The header shows the event with its delivery time, the time remaining and the progress.

All items sit in one list, grouped by product category. If at least two different storage locations are filled in on the products, the storage location takes over the grouping — your route through the store. A switch in the header flips between the two views. Every row shows the photo, the name, the pack size (“9 crates of 20 · 180 pieces”) and the note.

• One tap on the tick means packed in full; a second tap undoes it.
• If something is missing, tap the target quantity next to it and enter the quantity you actually packed (“3 of 6”). The row then counts as a shortage and moves to the top of the event lead's view.
• Once the truck is loaded, also tick loaded. That only works after “packed” — and at the truck for a whole group at once, e.g. “Cold room 2 — load 8 items”.

The status is kept after a reload, so the whole team sees the same state. If a tap doesn't get through on a poor signal, the tick stays put and the change is sent as soon as the connection is back.

The same packing list is also available in the back office: on the event's bookings tab you'll find it below the line items and can check items off yourself there – in the kitchen area also "produced", so the event lead can see the state at any time and keep it up to date.

Produced and packed are two separate steps. For kitchen items, the production status is shown on the right: "Produced" or "Not produced yet". A kitchen item can only be checked off once the kitchen has marked it produced — until then the row is locked (greyed out). That way nothing that isn't ready yet can be marked as packed. Logistics items have no production step and can be checked off at any time.

The printed production list stays available unchanged — the digital screen replaces the paper sheet but doesn't abolish it. Everything else — updating with a preview, finalising, shortages and loading — is covered in Packing list: packing, shortages and loading.

Driving deliveries and getting them signed

Once the office assigns you as the delivery driver on a delivery note, a Deliveries section appears in the portal — for team members with a login as well as for helpers on a portal link. The list is split into Upcoming and Done; deliveries without a recorded time stay under "Upcoming" so they don't get lost.

Tap a delivery and you get:

• Customer and phone number — tap to call. If no number is on file, it says so.
• Delivery address — tap to open your device's maps app.
• Delivery time — the time only shows if the office recorded one.
• What goes with it — quantity and name of each position. You never see prices here.

Use Get signature to have the customer sign right on your device: hand over the phone, they draw, enter their name and confirm the consent. The delivery note is then recorded as signed, and the signature appears with name and timestamp in the detail view. If the delivery note has no customer on file, signing is not possible — check with the office in that case.

Setting your availability

The Availability tab (visible to both groups) lets you set a weekly pattern — tap a weekday, choose a type (Available, Unavailable, Preferred) and an optional time window. For individual days, add a date-specific one-off exception. Your team uses this when planning shifts — see Staff planning board.

Installing the app and enabling notifications

On the portal's home screen, the Install as app card shows you how to add the portal to your device's home screen as its own app icon ("Get shift and message notifications straight to your phone."):

• Android / Chrome: Tap Install — your browser prompts you directly to install the app.
• iPhone (Safari): There's no one-tap install here. Instead, open the Share menu and choose Add to Home Screen. Notifications only work on iPhone from iOS 16.4 onward, and only inside the app installed this way — not in a regular Safari tab.

The card disappears automatically once you've already installed the app, or after you dismiss it (for 30 days).

Push notifications are a separate toggle: open Notifications in the portal and enable Enable notifications. Your browser then asks for permission — once you allow it, the card switches to Notifications active ("This device gets notified about new shifts, changes and messages."). If you previously declined the browser permission, it instead shows Notifications blocked, with a hint to allow it again in your browser settings. If a colleague uses the same device with their own account, the card shows "This device receives notifications for: [name]" so it's clear whose notifications are currently arriving.

Enabled push notifications inform you about:

• a newly assigned shift (immediately)
• changes or the cancellation of a shift (batched, if several changes happen in quick succession)
• a daily reminder about upcoming shifts
• new messages in team chat
• the decision on a vacation request

Frequently asked questions

I don't see an open shift even though I have time. Shifts with a skill requirement only show up for staff whose skills match. Ask your manager if a skill is missing from your profile.

The "Decline" button disappeared. Once you've confirmed a shift, only "Call in sick" remains — declining is intentionally no longer possible. Some workspaces also disable declining shifts entirely.

I don't see a task I'm working on. The portal only lists tasks assigned to you directly. If one is missing, ask your team to add you — it will then appear together with its comments area.

I can't find Pay, Vacation, or Files in the menu. These areas only exist for full team members with their own login. As external temp staff entering through a link, you only see the operational areas.

My link stopped working. Links for temp staff can expire or be revoked by the team. Ask your contact person for a new one.

I enabled push notifications but I'm not getting any. Check the Notifications area to see whether it shows Notifications blocked — that means you previously declined the browser permission and need to allow it manually in your browser settings for this site. On iPhone, push notifications additionally only work if you've installed the portal via Add to Home Screen and open it from there, not in a regular Safari tab.