Setting up HR from scratch: the right order

The HR module is interlinked: no contract without an employee, no employee without a department and a job title, and no payroll without contracts. Follow this order once and you will not need to revisit it — image 1.

The steps, in order

1. Departments — start with your structure: administration, finance, sales, warehouse and so on.
2. Job titles — manager, accountant, technician, storekeeper.
3. Salary components — the basic, the allowances and the deductions your business uses.
4. Leave types — annual, sick, emergency, unpaid, each with its entitlement.
5. Holiday calendar — record the year's public holidays for reference when planning.
6. Bonus types and deduction types.
7. Employees — only now, once every employee has a department and a title to belong to.
8. Employee contracts — each employee gets a contract with a basic salary and allowances.
9. Leave balances — use the initialize balances button to generate the year's balances in one go.
10. Day-to-day work starts after that: attendance, then leave requests, then monthly payroll.

Why this order

• An employee with no department or title does not appear usefully in the org chart or the reports.
• Payroll reads each employee's active contract; an employee without one never enters the run at all.
• Leave balances are held per leave type, so the types come before the balances.
• Leave days are counted by excluding Friday and Saturday only; see the holidays article for the detail.

Notes

• Do not enter every employee on day one; take one department through its full cycle to payroll, then roll it out.
• Salary components ship with common ones already defined; check them before adding a duplicate.
• The HR dashboard shows what is missing from day one: contracts about to expire, IDs and passports near expiry, and pending leave.
• Check the audit log after a bulk entry session to confirm what was created.