Human Resources · Getting started · 7 min read

Getting started with Employees

What to set up, and in which order, before you create the first employee.

Before you begin

Setting up the app is done by an administrator. Several steps need a different permission, so you may need help from a colleague:

• hr.configure saves jobs, positions, grades, contract types, calendars, leave setup, checklists and approval escalation.
• reference.manage saves departments and cost centres.
• A company administrator turns app features on or off and sets field modes. A second administrator must approve each change.

Do the steps below in this order, because each one is used by the next.

Steps

1. Choose the features. Open Applications > Employees > Features. Switch on the parts you will use: Hiring and offers, Time off, Time and attendance, Expenses travel and company cards, Benefit plans, Offboarding and terminations, Document renewal campaigns. Employees, contracts and assignments are always on. Propose the change with a reason; a second administrator approves it.
2. Choose the private fields. On Applications > Employees > Fields, set Date of birth, Personal email and Emergency contact to Hidden, Optional or Required. Expense merchant and Receipt reference are set here too. Hidden hides the box and refuses a value; Required stops the private information being saved without it.
3. Create departments and cost centres. Open Employees > Configuration > Organization > Departments and Cost centres. Enter a code of 2 to 30 letters, digits, underscores or hyphens, a name, and optionally an Arabic name and the unit it Rolls up to.
4. Create jobs and grades. Under Configuration > Organization, open Jobs and Grades. A grade has a rank from 0 to 1000.
5. Create contract types. Open Contract types and enter the probation in months (0 to 12). It is the default probation for contracts and offers of that type.
6. Create positions. Open Positions. Each position has a job, a department, an optional grade, and a Capacity FTE. Capacity limits how many people can fill the position at the same time.
7. Create the working calendar. Open Configuration > Organization > Time & leave > Working calendars and make, for example, a Monday to Friday calendar of 40 hours in the time zone Asia/Dubai. Then add public holidays on Holidays. See Shifts, rosters and working calendars.
8. Set up leave. Create leave types, an accrual plan and holidays as described in Set up leave types, accrual plans and holidays.
9. Create checklists. Under Configuration > Organization, make an Onboarding checklist (tasks copied onto each new hire) and an Offboarding checklist (notice days, departments that must clear, assets, when sign-in ends). You can start without them; hires then get no tasks and a leaver gets no clearance list.
10. Set approval escalation. Open Configuration > Approval escalation. Choose the response time in hours (default 48) and whether administrators are notified when an approval is overdue.
11. Give people their roles. In Administration, give each person the permissions their job needs. The main ones are:

1. Create the first employee. Follow Hire a new employee, or for a person already working with you, create the employee directly as described in The employee record, private information and documents.

What happens next

You can create employees, give them assignments and contracts, and activate them. People who manage others can already see their own team without any HR permission.

Good to know

• Departments and cost centres need reference.manage, not hr.configure, so an HR officer with only hr.configure cannot create them.
• Once an assignment uses a master (a position, calendar or contract type), its code and structure are locked. Create a new master for structural changes.
• The Employees menu shows some screens to everyone in HR even when the server will refuse the action. If you get a permission message, ask your administrator for the permission listed in the guide.