Documentation
Read the manual before you buy the product
27 guides, 266 sections, published in full and open to anyone. This is the same documentation HumanR customers read inside the product — how leave days are counted, what happens when you finalize a payroll run, which permission gates which screen. If a system is going to hold your payroll, you should be able to read how it behaves before you sign anything.
Not sure where to start?
Read System rules & definitions first. It is the one guide that explains the decisions the product makes on its own — who counts as staff, what a pay month is, how a leave day is counted. Every other guide assumes it.
Getting started
System rules & definitions
The decisions HumanR makes on its own — how a leave day is counted, when a ticket falls due, who lands on a payslip, why a name drops off a chart. None of these live on a settings screen, so this page is where they are written down in plain language. If a number here surprises you, this is the page to point at.
10 sections
Filter & search guide
The same filter-and-search box sits above most lists in HumanR — staff, leave, payroll, loans, documents, accommodation and more. It behaves identically on every one; only the columns change to match the list. One box replaces a row of dropdowns: pick several values at once, search by part of a name, exclude a value, and share the result as a link. You never have to type the syntax: + Add filter writes it for you.
17 sections
People
Staff records guide
The staff list is the heart of HumanR — nearly every other screen (payroll, leave, attendance, deployment) hangs off it. This guide covers adding people, keeping their records current, what you can see on a profile, how leavers and rehires are handled, and how personal data is protected.
8 sections
Documents guide
Two document jobs live in HumanR, and they are not the same thing. Company documents are the policies and memos staff must read and acknowledge, with a record of who has. Employee documents are the personal papers — passports, visas, permits — whose expiry you track so a renewal is never missed. This guide covers both.
10 sections
Expiry alerts guide
HumanR keeps an eye on the dates that run out — passports, work permits, visas, medicals, contracts, probation periods and quota permits — and warns the right people before they lapse. This guide explains what it watches, when the warnings go out, and above all who receives them and how you change that.
8 sections
Employee self-service guide
Self-service is your own corner of HumanR — it shows your information and nobody else's. Here you can check payslips, see your leave balance and request time off, ask to correct your details, and apply for an advance or a loan. This guide is for staff using self-service.
6 sections
Medical & insurance guide
Two registers under one switch. Medical fitness tracks the examinations your people have had, the ones their jobs require, and the gap between — the food-handler card an inspector asks for, the seafarer medical that lets somebody sail. Group insurance tracks the contracts you buy, every life they reach including family, and who is on the roll with no cover at all. Both answer the same shape of question: who is covered, until when, and who is not.
13 sections
Noticeboard & celebrations
The board is how the company says something to everybody — a notice, a welcome, an event, a reminder that Thursday is a holiday. It is the engagement side of HumanR, not the compliance side: nothing on it is signed for. Anything that must be provably read is a company document, and this guide is careful about which is which.
10 sections
Letters & e-signature guide
The letters your office issues on its own paper — contracts, offers, warnings, certificates of employment — written once as a template, generated with a person's real values, filed on their record where nobody can quietly edit them afterwards, and where it matters, signed: by staff in their portal, by someone standing at your desk, or by a person outside the company through a private one-time link.
11 sections
Time & attendance
Attendance guide
How raw clock-ins become a timesheet, a monthly summary and — where you switch them on — overtime and late fines on the payslip. Punches arrive from the attendance machines or a spreadsheet upload, a rollup turns them into one row per person per day, and the same maths the payslip uses is shown back to you first so nothing is a surprise at month end.
11 sections
ZKTeco Integration Guide — HumanR
How to connect ZKTeco attendance machines (fingerprint / face / card, any model with ADMS a.k.a. Cloud Server support) to HumanR so punches flow in automatically. No SDK, no middleware, no polling — the device pushes to the app over plain HTTP using ZK's iClock "push" protocol, which HumanR implements natively at /iclock/*.
7 sections
Leave guide
One place for every leave record — who is away, who is due back, and how many days each person has left. You set the rulebook once (types, holidays, ticket intervals); after that every trip is a record that flows through approval, updates the person's status, and keeps its own running balance. This is the replacement for the leave tracker spreadsheet, done so a balance is never re-keyed.
13 sections
Roster & scheduling
A roster is the plan: who works which shift, where, on which day. Publishing it tells the people it names — and from then on the day is measured against that rather than against a flat site default. One sentence is worth holding on to before anything else: the roster changes what was expected of a day, never what somebody is recorded as having worked. Worked hours are always the clock.
11 sections
Pay
Payroll workflow
How a payroll run goes from a blank draft to a finalized, locked record: what the system works out on its own, what a person enters by hand, who is allowed to change each thing, and how staff paid in more than one package or currency are handled.
9 sections
Loans guide
Loans lets you lend money to staff and recover it automatically through payroll. This guide covers what a loan is, the steps it goes through, how repayments come off pay, how the outstanding balance is worked out, and the day-to-day portfolio view.
6 sections
Expense claims
Money somebody spent out of their own pocket and wants back — a taxi to the airport office, a customs charge paid in cash at the port, a clinic bill the company covers. Filed with the receipt, decided by an approver, and repaid on the next payroll run as a single line on the payslip.
8 sections
Payroll to accounts guide
This module turns a finalized payroll run into a journal for your accounting system — either a file you import, or a direct posting to QuickBooks Online. This guide covers connecting an accounting system, mapping pay to accounts, running an export, and the history it keeps.
6 sections
Workflow
Recruitment & onboarding guide
Hiring is one continuous funnel: an opening attracts candidates, a candidate is chosen and hired, and from that single click the person is routed one of two ways — straight onto the books as a local hire, or onto the expat immigration pipeline. Both routes land on the same onboarding checklist, and finishing it turns the hire into a full staff record. This guide follows that path end to end.
10 sections
Approvals workflow
One engine sits behind every request that needs a sign-off — a salary increment, a leave request, a leave encashment, a salary hold. This guide explains the journey a request takes from submitted to decided, exactly what each request and step state means, how a request finds its approver, and the two things that keep a queue moving: delegation and escalation.
10 sections
Discipline guide
Discipline records formal action fairly and keeps a defensible paper trail — from a first counselling note up to termination. This guide covers the steps a case goes through, what locks once a letter is issued, acknowledgement and appeals, financial penalties, and how attachments are kept.
7 sections
Cases & speak-up
The intake front door: someone raises something — a question, a grievance, a protected disclosure, a data request — and it is acknowledged on a clock, worked through a confidential thread, and answered on the record. The registers that already exist (Investigations for fact-finding, Discipline for consequence) are the back half; this module is how a concern gets in.
10 sections
Safety incidents
The register of what happened — an injury, a near-miss, damage, a fire — and of what was done about it. The rest of HumanR proves a person was fit and equipped; this module records the day that wasn't enough, and chases the corrective actions that stop it happening twice.
9 sections
Performance guide
Most appraisal tools ask a manager to remember a year and score it in December. HumanR does the opposite: it writes the year down as it happens — goals with dated check-ins, feedback filed the week it occurred — and then puts all of it on the review form, beside the operational record the system already holds. The rating is written against evidence, not memory. This guide follows that arc: the form and its evidence panel first, then the cycle around it, then the year between the reviews.
10 sections
Learning & training
Two ways of teaching people something — a course they take on a phone between shifts, and a session somebody stands up and runs — and one place the result lands: the certification register. Nothing downstream can tell the two apart, which is the whole design. A fire drill on the jetty and a fire-safety course taken at midnight both put the same row on the compliance matrix, the same expiry in the diary and the same certificate in the employee's file. This guide follows that: courses first, then sessions, then the skills the two of them prove.
18 sections
Administration
Users, roles & permissions guide
This is the guide behind every “ask an administrator to grant the permission” message in HumanR. It explains how access works — roles hold permissions, and people are given a role — how to create accounts and employee logins, and how passwords and sign-ins are handled.
8 sections
Report builder guide
How to build, filter, group, save and share a report — including Excel-style formula columns and period-on-period comparisons. The builder is self-service: you compose a report against a data source, preview it live, and keep it to run again later.
14 sections
Webhooks guide
Webhooks push HumanR events out to other systems — a message in a Slack or Teams channel when payroll is finalized, or a notification to your own software when a permit is about to expire. This guide covers adding an endpoint, choosing events, signing, and reading the delivery log.
6 sections
Building against it?
The REST API and webhook reference is separate, and implementation covers how a company gets its data in.
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