IN-HOUSE EMPLOYEE AUCTION

This guide covers everything Admin needs to run the auction day-to-day: reviewing and deleting bids, setting the submission deadline, finding the highest bidder for each item, generating the final results list, and managing the item catalogue and employee directory.

• Logging in
• The admin dashboard
• Setting the submission deadline
• Viewing and deleting bids
• One bid per employee — and how to let someone resubmit
• Finding the highest bidder for an item
• Generating the final bidder list
• Downloading records
• Managing items (add, edit, delete)
• The employee-facing User Guide page
• Short URL (optional)
• Security best practices
• Troubleshooting
• Appendix A — Technical reference

1. Go to yourdomain.com/admin.php (replace with your actual domain).
2. Enter the admin password and click "Log in."

After logging in you'll see, in order:

• A "Submission deadline" card, where you can set, change, or clear the deadline shown to employees.
• Four buttons: "Manage Items," "Generate Final Bidder List," "Download CSV," and "Log out."
• The "Highest bidder lookup" tool.
• A table of every submission received, with a Delete button on each row.

Only Admin can set, change, or clear this — employees only ever see the result, never a way to edit it.

1. Under "Submission deadline" on the dashboard, pick a date in the "Set / change deadline" field.
2. Click "Save." The bid form immediately starts showing this date and a live day count to every employee who opens it.
3. To remove the deadline entirely (so the form stops showing one), click "Clear deadline."

Employees see one of three messages depending on the date:

Every submission appears in the table with the employee's details, the item(s) and bid amount(s), payment mode, and the confirmation checkboxes they ticked.

Deleting a bid

1. Find the row you want to remove.
2. Click "Delete" at the end of that row.
3. Confirm when prompted — this cannot be undone.

Each Employee ID can submit only one bid. If they try again, the form blocks it and shows them the reference number of their existing bid instead of saving a new one.

If an employee needs to correct or change their bid, delete their existing submission (see Section 4 above). Once it's deleted, their Employee ID is immediately free to submit a new bid — this is the intended way to handle corrections.

1. Under "Highest bidder lookup," choose an item from the dropdown (it lists every item that has at least one bid on it).
2. Click "Find highest bidders."
3. A ranked table appears showing every employee who bid on that item, highest amount first, with their name, Employee ID, department, contact number, and bid reference.

When the auction is done, click "Generate Final Bidder List" on the dashboard. This computes, for every item in the catalogue, the single highest bid and who placed it — all at once, rather than one item at a time.

Each item shows one of three outcomes:

A summary strip at the top gives quick counts (items total, awarded, tied, no bids). From this page you can also:

1. Download CSV — exports this exact final list (one row per item, or one row per tied bidder for items with a tie) as a spreadsheet, separate from the raw submissions.csv export on the main dashboard.
2. Print — opens the browser's print dialog with a clean, print-friendly layout (buttons and navigation are hidden automatically).

Click "Download CSV" on the dashboard to download every raw submission as a spreadsheet, ready to open in Excel or Google Sheets — useful for offline review, sharing with Finance, or archiving after the auction closes. (This is different from the Final Bidder List CSV in Section 7, which is a computed summary rather than the raw submission log.)

Click "Manage Items" on the dashboard to open the item catalogue page.

Adding an item

1. Fill in the Item No (must be unique, e.g. "F-21"), the Item Name, and the Minimum Amount (PKR).
2. Click "Add item."
3. The new item is immediately available in the dropdown on the employee bid form.

Editing an item

1. Click "Edit" next to the item — its details load into the form above, which switches to "Edit item" mode.
2. Change the Item No, Item Name, and/or Minimum Amount as needed.
3. Click "Save changes" (or "Cancel" to leave it as is).

Deleting an item

1. Click "Delete" next to the item, and confirm.

This only removes it from the dropdown for new bids — any past submissions that already reference it are left untouched in the records, so auction history is never altered.

Items live in data/items.csv, protected from direct browser access the same way submissions.csv is.

A "User Guide" button in the header of the bid form opens a walkthrough built right into the site (guide.php) — the same visual style as the bid form, covering the whole process step by step, with an FAQ.

There's nothing to configure day-to-day. If you later change how the form itself behaves (e.g. add a new payment method or change the number of required confirmations), update the matching wording in guide.php so the guide stays accurate — see Appendix A.3 for the file location.

If you'd like employees to use a short link (e.g. yourdomain.com/vote) instead of the full path to index.php, this is set up once via a .htaccess file at the root of your site — not inside the auction folder.

1. Place the provided .htaccess file in your site's root folder (public_html/), one level above the auction/ folder.
2. It aliases the short path to the real form, and also routes the stylesheet and Employee ID lookup through correctly so nothing breaks under the shorter address.

• Change the admin password in config.php before sharing the form link, and periodically afterward — see Appendix A.2.
• Do not share the admin.php link or password with anyone outside the auction team.
• Log out (using the "Log out" button) when you are done, especially on a shared computer.
• Download and archive the CSV once the auction closes, in case records need to be reviewed later.

The tasks below require editing a file directly via your host's File Manager (or FTP). If you're not comfortable doing this yourself, ask your IT contact or the person who deployed the system.

A.1 — Updating the employee directory

Open employees.php in a code editor. Each employee is one line, in the form:

Add, edit, or remove a line as needed (keep the Employee ID in quotes as the array key, and make sure each line still ends with a comma), then save the file.

A.2 — Changing the admin password

Open config.php and change the value on the line starting with define('ADMIN_PASSWORD', ...) to a new, strong password, then save the file.

A.3 — File reference

For anything beyond this guide, contact your IT department or the person who set up this system.