Five Minute Trial

This is the Alpaka Play Along trial - completely anonymously, you can log in to a fresh installation of Alpaka exactly as you'd find it on day one as a new client. Follow along with what happens on screen, or pause it and make your own mess, and you'll experience at least two of the most valuable features in Alpaka and see real value in the first few minutes. You'll need a smartphone to install an app temporarily. You won't need any personal information or identity to take part, and at the end of the trial any images of yourself or information you've entered are automatically and completely deleted - that's an automated two-hour cycle. So if it's five to an even-numbered hour, don't start now - wait until the hour has passed, because everything is wiped on even-numbered hours of the day.

First, take your smartphone - this works on Android and Apple - and find Alpaka Presence in the app store. Install it. The first time, it asks for permission to use the camera, geolocation and storage. Then it asks you to configure the device so it knows who it is, where it is and what it's doing. On a web browser (Chrome is recommended), go to trial.alpaka.io and log in with trial@alpaka.io and the password - a capital P, "a", two fives instead of "ss", "word", and a full stop at the end. It doesn't need to be secure, since everything here is wiped automatically and there's no real or personal information involved.

Go to Alpaka Presence, the time and attendance functionality, then Devices - there's a device already waiting for you. You can enter its config code manually, or reveal a config QR code and scan it. This example device has only a face button and no keypad - if you want to know more about keypads and other buttons, that's covered in the other support movies. Press the face button as if you're arriving at work - it counts down, takes a photo, and you're done. In a real workplace, this device would be fixed near the entrance and exit, and everyone coming and going uses the same one. There are also scenarios where staff use their own phone as the device instead, covered elsewhere in more depth.

Go to Presence, then Faces. The first reading won't be identified yet - Alpaka doesn't know who it is. Identify the reading as a person - either an existing name, or add a new member of staff (name only is enough, none of the other HR fields matter for this trial) - and assign the face to their record. From that point on, that photo becomes part of their HR record and Alpaka will recognise them automatically. You don't have to identify anyone in advance - Alpaka will keep building timesheet data from unidentified faces for 28 days, and once you do identify someone, everything already recorded falls into place retroactively.

Do a second reading, as if leaving work. If you clock in and then immediately clock in again by mistake (a "double bounce"), Alpaka ignores repeat readings within five minutes of each other, so a moment of confusion doesn't create a false second shift. Once both readings are in, Alpaka pairs them into a single shift automatically - you can review each reading with its watermarked, timestamped photo, so any edit made later can always be checked against the original.

Next, go to Rotas and add one - it names itself, and you choose which site it's for. This creates an empty rota with no staff and no shifts yet. Add people to it using the green plus button - one at a time or several at once. The first rota you build is the hardest one you'll ever make, because after that you can clone it forward to the next period, or use it to establish a regular working pattern for each person.

To fill in shifts: click once on a cell to add the first shift type, click again to cycle to the next, and keep clicking to cycle through or clear it - similar to filling in a grid in Excel. It's best to keep one shift type selected at a time and fill in all of one kind before switching to the next. As you go, a tally at the bottom keeps count by department, by shift or by headcount, which helps confirm you've scheduled what you meant to. You can also create a one-off custom shift on the fly - for example, someone starting late for a dentist appointment - with its own start time, colour and payable duration (which can be less than the shift's full duration, to account for an unpaid break).

From the rota you can download an Excel version, including annual leave if needed - Alpaka has a full annual leave budgeting feature, not covered in this trial. Once pay rates and contracts are filled in, Alpaka can cost a rota so you know what a period of staffing will actually cost. Under Settings you can also create new shift types beyond the ones that come with the trial - give it a name, a start time and a duration (not an end time - the duration matters because it's what determines payable hours once any unpaid break is accounted for).

Back in Presence, the two readings for your test clock-in and clock-out are now paired into a single timesheet entry. It's marked as an "issue" simply because Alpaka has no rota, contract or pattern of work to compare it against yet - once you fill those in, matching readings turn green ("complete") automatically. This is Alpaka's traffic-light system: only readings that don't match what was expected - lateness, early leaving, anything unexplained - are flagged for attention. Everything that matches quietly resolves itself.

For reporting, go to Presence Totals and download a report - the most useful format combines rate, days and a forecast. Choose your date range and download; the file arrives as an Excel spreadsheet with a full breakdown of comings and goings and cumulative time at work for the period. With only one shift in the trial it won't show its full scale, but in a real account, once pay grades, contracts and shift templates are filled in, this same report shows gross wages, what's outstanding, and - if you run it partway through a pay period - a forecast of the full period's cost.

While logged in, you can start a support chat and ask a question directly - it comes straight to the Alpaka team. This trial only demonstrates time and attendance through Presence and rotas, but everything else - email templates, triggers, training, annual leave, absence - works in full during the trial too; the support website covers all of it. If you have a question these movies haven't answered, or a way of working you'd like Alpaka to support, get in touch for a more personalised demo.