Creating Your Workspace

This guide walks you through starting a Sparko free trial and creating your company's workspace.

Before You Start

• Use your work email address. Your email's domain identifies your company: one company domain maps to exactly one Sparko workspace.
• Every trial includes the Business feature set for 14 days, with no credit card required. The free week of Growth or Business stays available once you are on a paid Core or Growth plan.
• Your trial comes with one AI allowance for the whole trial: 250 AI actions and 75 assistant actions, the same however many people you import. Candidate screening during a trial runs overnight, up to 125 applications a night. When the allowance is used up, Sparko says so and offers Choose a plan; everything you can do without AI keeps working.

Step 1: Sign Up

1. Go to app.sparko.app/signup
2. Enter your work email and company name
3. Pick your workspace URL: this becomes your team's sign-in address (for example, brightwave.sparko.app). Use 4 to 30 characters: lowercase letters, numbers or hyphens. Sparko suggests one from your company name and tells you immediately if it's available.
4. Enter your country: this sets your workspace's timezone, public-holiday calendar, and leave defaults
5. Click Create my workspace

Workspace URL rules

• No spelling of Sparko, including lookalikes such as sp4rko.
• Not too close to an existing workspace URL.
• Some names are reserved, including well-known company names held for their owners. Pick another URL, or contact [email protected] if the name is yours.

Step 2: Confirm Your Email

We send a confirmation link to your address. Click it, then click Create my workspace on the page that opens. The link is valid for 24 hours: if it expires, just sign up again with the same details.

Step 3: Set Your Password

Once your workspace is created, you'll set your password right away and land in guided setup.

Choose how much to set up

Pick a path, then confirm your company, your headcount and the countries you employ in. Sparko recommends a path, and you can choose any of the three:

Path	What you review
Simple	Basics, legal entity, team import, then confirm and launch
Balanced	Simple, plus modules and leave, holidays and hours
Advanced	All eight steps, including Growth & culture and AI & Privacy

Simple is recommended for fewer than 50 people in one country. Balanced fits up to 250 people in up to three countries; larger or more international teams get Advanced.

The recommendation explains itself, for example: Simple. Recommended for a team of 11 to 49 in one country.

Every path asks you to confirm the legal entity and its authorised signatory before your first launch. An existing entity is kept. If its signer needs attention, update it in Workspace settings, Entities, then confirm it here. A change to the entity or signer after your review needs another confirmation. On a later re-run of Advanced, this step is optional.

The shorter paths fill skipped settings and show them under Written for you before launch: one line per area that Sparko fills, each with Adjust later, which names where to change it after launch. Simple enables entitled modules and uses the primary country's leave defaults, available holiday calendar and a standard Monday-to-Friday work week. Other countries use those global rules until you add country rules in Time & Leave. Where no curated country template exists, Sparko labels the leave rules as generic and does not invent a holiday calendar.

Curated leave defaults cover 14 countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States. For Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the default is the statutory minimum annual leave for a new hire. The leave step shows the statutory notes, "Counted in working days", who qualifies, and a "Source:" link to the official text. Sparko deducts leave in working days, so where the law counts calendar days (Qatar and Saudi Arabia grant 21) the default is the working-day equivalent, 15 days on a five-day week, and the note says so. Where a country's sick leave is paid per illness, paid at a reducing rate the longer it lasts, or earned month by month, Sparko shows the rule as a note and does not create a sick-leave type; the step says so, and you add one in Time & Leave, PTO Policies.

Both shorter paths prepare Growth & culture drafts after you import a team, using your plan's AI allowance. Finishing those drafts later, from the reminder, keeps the path you chose; Sparko records the continuation separately. Salary bands depend on the job-family draft. Preparation failures stay visible: retry, or explicitly leave those drafts for later. With no team, these AI drafts wait; Sparko reminds you after your first hire only for work recorded as deferred for that reason. Deliberately skipped work does not trigger a reminder. Dismiss a reminder to hide it for everyone in your company; the work stays deferred. Open Dismissed items to see who dismissed it and restore it. Completing the work clears its deferred marker, so restoring an old dismissal cannot bring completed work back.

AI is on by default; an existing assistant preference is respected. The shorter paths choose band-only pay visibility for a first setup and preserve existing visibility on a re-run. Adjust later explains where each setting can be changed after launch without leaving your unsaved setup.

The Advanced path

Advanced keeps the eight-step review:

1. Basics: your company details are prefilled from signup; just confirm your country (it drives holidays, leave defaults, and your work week)
2. Legal entity: the company that employs your team and signs documents: legal name, registration number, registered country and address, and default currency. The legal name and country come from Basics, and the currency from the country. Choose who signs for the company: You, or someone Outside the company by name, email and title. Another member is not available yet in setup: import your team first, then pick them under Workspace settings > Entities. If the entity can't be added, Sparko says why and setup waits until you fix it
3. Import your team: upload a spreadsheet, or connect your current HRIS (BambooHR, SAP SuccessFactors, or Workday) with its URL and an API key and Sparko reads your directory. Either way, a review window shows every row before anyone is staged: edit cells, remove rows, then confirm. The API key is used once and never stored
4. Modules: enable the modules you need; everything can be flipped later
5. Leave, holidays & hours: Sparko proposes global defaults (annual leave, a separate sick-leave policy, holiday calendars, work week) plus a per-country override you can adjust for each country your team works in. Approve each block (or edit first); overrides apply only to people working in that country. Nothing you don't approve is created
6. Growth & culture: proposals built from your import: career paths clustered from your job titles (untick any you don't want), salary bands per job family, level and office location, a 30/60/90 onboarding task library, a pulse-survey cadence with a first draft survey, an interview pipeline with offer approvals, plus an optional first review cycle and starter company OKRs. The AI-drafted blocks (career paths, salary bands, onboarding tasks and starter OKRs) wait for you: select Draft with AI on each one you want, or Skip it, so a block you skip uses no AI action. Salary bands drafts the career paths first if you have not. Saved drafts remain available for 7 days; changing their company or team inputs can require a new draft and AI action. The bands block says which grain it is pricing at. With no office locations yet it reads "Bands are company-wide until you add office locations."; once you have some it reads either "Bands are priced per office location." or "Bands are company-wide.", whichever your band geography setting says. A Locations link beside it opens the locations page in a new tab, so you can add offices without losing your place in setup, and you can change the grain later in Admin mode > Settings > Compensation > Structure
7. AI & Privacy: turn the AI assistant on or off and choose your pay-transparency level
8. Confirm & launch: full-width sections listing exactly what will be created, nothing more

Imported teammates are staged, not emailed: you send invitations from Admin Settings → People when you're ready. You can re-open guided setup any time from Admin Settings → Company; re-runs only add, they never replace what you've already configured.

While You Are the Only Person

Some steps normally need a second person, so nobody approves their own work. While you are the only person in your workspace, Sparko lets you finish these yourself:

• Publishing a job that needs approval goes live straight away.
• Submitting an offer approves it, so you can send it.
• Approving your own profile change in the approvals inbox applies it.
• Verifying your own bank details marks them verified for payroll.

Each one is marked "Approved by the only person in this workspace" and written to the audit log for review. As soon as anyone else is added to the workspace, even someone who later leaves, these steps need another person again.

If Your Company Already Uses Sparko

If your email's domain already has a Sparko workspace, you won't be able to create a second one. Instead, after confirming your email you'll be offered two options:

• Ask a colleague: any administrator of your company's workspace can invite you directly
• Send a join request: we'll notify your workspace's administrators; they'll email you an invitation if approved

Troubleshooting

Problem	What to do
Confirmation email didn't arrive	Check your spam folder, then sign up again: a new link replaces the old one
"This workspace URL is already taken"	Pick one of the suggested alternatives or enter a different one
"This email already has a Sparko account"	Log in instead: use your workspace's sign-in address
Confirmation link expired	Sign up again with the same details
"This name is too close to an existing workspace. If this is your company, contact [email protected]."	Pick a URL that differs more, for example add your city or a word. If the workspace is your company's, contact [email protected].
"This contains our brand name, Sparko. Pick another workspace URL"	Pick a URL without "sparko" or a lookalike spelling.
"This name is reserved. If you believe this is a mistake, contact [email protected]."	Pick another URL, or contact [email protected].
"This name is reserved. If it is your brand, contact [email protected] to claim it."	Pick another URL. If the name is your brand, contact [email protected] to claim it.
"Too many signups from this network" or "Too many signups for this company domain"	Wait up to an hour and try again.
"Signup is busy. Try again in a minute."	Wait a minute and try again.

What Happens After Your Trial

Your trial lasts 14 days. When it ends, your workspace becomes read-only. Your data stays in place, but not forever: if you never pick a plan, the workspace and everything in it is permanently deleted 180 days after your trial ended. A paid plan that ends works the same way, with 30 days instead of 180. Your billing contacts get an email 30 days and again 7 days before the deletion date, and the email names the date.

The next time anyone signs in, a message explains that the workspace is locked. What it offers depends on who is signing in:

• Admins get Choose a plan, which opens Billing. Picking a plan unlocks everything straight away.
• Everyone else is told to ask an admin to subscribe. Only an admin can pick a plan.

Both see Browse in read-only mode. That hides the message so you can look around, read records and check numbers before deciding. An amber notice stays at the top of every page while the workspace is locked, and anything that would save a change is blocked until a plan is active. The message comes back the next time you sign in.

Subscribe any time before the deletion date and you pick up exactly where you left off. After that date the data cannot be recovered. If you need more time, contact [email protected].

Moving to a Smaller Plan

Plans include different numbers of custom fields and paying entities. If you move to a plan that includes fewer than you currently use, Sparko asks you to choose what stays active before you carry on.

You will see a short two-step chooser, one step per area you are over:

1. Custom fields: tick the fields to keep. Each row shows the field type and how many profiles use it, so you can see what you would lose.
2. Paying entities: tick the entities to keep. Each row shows the country, currency and how many employees are assigned. If an entity you are dropping still has employees on it, you are warned how many need reassigning before the next payroll run.

Once you have ticked your plan's limit, the remaining boxes lock so you cannot pick too many.

Nothing is deleted. Unticked items are deactivated. Saved values stay on every profile, and employee assignments stay attached. If you later move back to a bigger plan, or free up a slot, you can reactivate anything you deactivated from the same admin page you created it on.