Setting up time zones and languages

Audience: Administrators and Site Managers
Application: Admin
Estimated time: 8 minutes

Anghello adapts to multi-site, multilingual organizations: each site has its own time zone, the admin interface speaks each user's language, the check-in kiosk offers visitors several languages, and notifications (email, SMS, Teams) are sent in the recipient's language. This article walks through each of these settings: where to configure them, and what they actually change.

Before you start

• You need administrator access (organization settings) or manager access (site settings).
• Languages are configured at several independent levels: organization, site, employee, and visitor. A more specific setting always overrides a more general one.

Overview

The site time zone

Each site has its own time zone, set at creation and editable at any time.

1. Open the site details (Sites → your site → Edit site).
2. In the Time zone field, select the site's time zone, shown with its offset (e.g. Europe/Paris (GMT+02:00)).
3. Save.

The time zone is used to display and schedule visits on that site: arrival and departure times in the dashboard and history, exports, scheduled visits, evacuation reports, attendance sheets, and the automatic closing of visits at the end of the day.

💡 Tip: when you create a site, the time zone is pre-filled with the one detected from your browser. If you're creating a site remotely (say, a New York site from Paris), remember to correct it.

The admin interface language

The admin portal is available in 5 languages: French, English, German, Spanish, and Italian. Two settings come into play.

The organization language

On the Organization page, the Organization language field sets the "default language for the admin interface and for the evacuation alert emails sent to administrators". It's your company's reference language.

Each user's individual choice

Every admin portal user can change their interface language via the language selector (the menu showing the current language). Their choice is remembered in their browser and takes precedence over everything else.

The displayed language is resolved in this order:

1. The user's manual choice in the selector, if they made one;
2. Otherwise, their browser language, if it's one of the 5 supported languages;
3. Otherwise, the organization language.

The check-in kiosk languages (visitor kiosk)

The check-in kiosk offers visitors up to 9 languages: French, English, German, Dutch (Belgium), Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and Polish.

1. Open Sites → your site → Settings → Language management tab.
2. In the Site languages section, select and reorder the Available languages you want to offer visitors.
3. Save.

On the kiosk, visitors switch languages via the flags shown on screen: with up to 4 languages, they're all displayed side by side; beyond that, the extra languages are grouped in a dropdown menu. The initial language is detected automatically from the tablet's browser language.

💡 Important: when you add a new language, the generic texts ("Welcome", standard field labels…) are translated for you. Your own content, however — custom fields, instructions, quizzes — is not translated automatically: translate it manually or with the Translate all button (machine translation).

The notification language for host employees

When a visitor arrives or leaves, their host is notified by email, SMS, or Microsoft Teams. These notifications are available in 5 languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian. The language is set at two levels.

At the site level

1. Open Sites → your site → Settings → Notifications tab.
2. In the Notification language section, choose the language.
3. Save.

This is the default language for all notifications sent by that site. When a site is created, it's initialized with the organization language.

At the employee level

1. Open Employees → select the employee → Notification preferences tab.
2. In the Notification language section, choose that employee's language — or leave Default (site language).
3. Save.

Ideal for an international site: the site can notify in French by default, while an English-speaking employee receives their notifications in English.

The language actually used for each notification follows this cascade:

1. The language set on the employee's record, if defined;
2. Otherwise, the site's notification language;
3. Otherwise, French.

📸 [Screenshot: employee record, Notification preferences tab with the language selector]

The notification language for visitors

Emails sent to visitors (invitations, visit confirmations…) use the visitor contact's language. It's initialized with the language the visitor used on the kiosk at check-in, and visitors can change it themselves when completing their contact details. Failing that, the site's notification language applies, then French.

Good to know

💡 The organization language does not apply to employee and visitor notifications: those follow the language "in the field" (recipient, then site). A French headquarters never forces French on the hosts of a Spanish site. The organization language remains the reference for the admin interface and for the evacuation alert emails sent to administrators.

💡 Evacuation alerts sent to administrators and managers use the notification language of the site concerned, falling back to the organization language.

💡 The kiosk languages (9) and the notification languages (5) are two independent lists: a visitor can check in using Polish on the kiosk, but notifications will fall back to the site's or the host employee's language.

Troubleshooting

Updated on: 23/07/2026