Employee Management Software FAQs

A lot of our customers come to us looking for various ways to manage their teams.

Increasingly these are small businesses without HR managers or departments – and that have no intention of creating HR departments.

In many instances, we think this is smart unless you have a really proactive People Management team that focuses on developing and attracting talent rather than just handling the admin associated with managing staff.

So what do they ask us?:

Does your staff management software have a calendar view that shows who’s off work and when?

Yes. And most Employee Management Software providers will. But it’s a vital feature that smart managers seem to want.

HRLocker can also facilitate this view using an iCal link to show in calendar formats such as those used by Microsoft Office 365 / Outlook, Google / GSuite and Mac.

Having your holiday planner visible to all saves insane amounts of time and hassle.

If you’ve distributed a policy (digitally signed so you know everyone is informed – and that’s logged) about who can be off and when, (e.g., to prevent shortages of staff with certain authority or credentials at busy times), then your team will only request times that they’re able to after a swift visual check of the planner, preventing ‘email ping pong‘ and crossed wires.

Managers then simply request or deny the automated request and the employee is notified and the time off booked is viewable in the team calendar.

Will your employee management solutions calculate our annual leave balances if we join part-way through an annual leave year?

The answer is yes. All you need to do is set your company’s leave year and make sure each employee has a start date – and finish date where relevant – and the pro rata leave is calculated.

Our Support team can help with this if you need to bring in existing leave balances etc.

Once you’ve entered a snapshot of your annual leave taken/available into a new account, then you can rest easy knowing it’s all calculated accurately from there.

Will HRLocker calculate leave remaining for workers that leave the organisation partway through the leave year?

Absolutely. Once a finish date is entered an adjusted annual leave balance will be shown so that the employee can use this before the end of their employment and/or notice period.

Will we be able to calculate annual leave for part-time workers?

Yes. But, outside of Time Off in Lieu (TOIL), in the current system, this can only be done for those with fixed part-time hours and/or days.

Holidays for staff that have hours that vary cannot be calculated in the current version.

But the total hours worked are all logged can so you can apply formulas such as the ‘8% rules‘ used in countries such as the UK or Ireland.

Can employees request holidays by the hour?

There’s a whole blog post about this one!

Can you bulk upload employee details into the system?

Yes. But we don’t advise it unless you’re a very large company looking to roll the system out extremely quickly.

This is something we’ve done for clients (at extra charge) with over 300 employees, where we’ve put systems live in just 3 days.

But whether you did this yourself or asked us, it’s a process fraught with error and potential data breaches. Here’s why:

Most cloud HR solutions are super easy to deploy. And a lot of the ‘work‘ (and ongoing maintenance of personal information) is intended to be left to the employees to control their personal data (important in relation to GDPR) via employee self-service.

But the uploaded data still needs checking and rechecking anyway no matter what format you have it in. It’s simply not as easy as uploading an excel.

And where would you generate the excel from? Another system with different fields? Or your current spreadsheet system or disparate files.

That eventual file needs a lot of checking and rechecking first. So it’s likely to be harder work and more time-consuming than briefly entering each employee manually into HRLocker.

That doesn’t have to be as intensive as you think. Our recommended workflow is always to set your company up from ‘the top down‘.

So (usually on your 14-day free trial) you set up your admins and managers.

Then, once the managers are familiar with how they were invited in – and ‘self-served‘ themselves into the system – they can confidently invite their own team in and check the details are correct for each instance of direct report.

All managers and admins then need to enter and check the sensitive details and documents associated with each employee.

This is a more efficient and holistic way of getting instant buy-in and a wider understanding of the system.

Remember these types of systems are easy. They’re supposed to be.

So your team should have no worries about receiving their invites, watching a short clip about how to request leave, sign a document or upload a training cert etc.

Does HRLocker have a payroll integration?

In the current version (post published Nov 2017) there are no integrations or open API instances.

However, for the payroll issue, access to all the data that your Finance Department would need is in the system under Reports.

So the most efficient way of handling this requirement is to give appropriate permissions to personnel in Finance to run the reports they need at the intervals they need the data from.

HRLocker logs huge amounts of data from activity in the system to deliver these reports

You can really slice and dice whatever you need from the relevant modules in the date ranges you need across the whole organisation down to individual employee levels.