How HR & Payroll (HCM) Works
Employee records, payroll runs, leave management, shift scheduling, expenses, and how HCM connects to accounting and field service.
What HCM does
HCM (Human Capital Management) manages the full employee lifecycle: from hiring through onboarding, day-to-day management (shifts, leave, expenses, timesheets), to payroll and offboarding. Everything is linked — payroll draws from timesheets and expense claims, leave affects shift scheduling, and payroll runs post automatically to Accounting.
The employee record
Each employee record holds:
- Personal and contact details
- Employment type, start date, salary or hourly rate
- Role, department, line manager
- Documents (contracts, certificates, right-to-work evidence)
- Training records
Employee records are separate from platform user accounts. An employee does not automatically have a login — you assign a user account separately if they need platform access.
Key HCM modules
Shifts & Scheduling Build shift patterns and assign employees to shifts. The schedule view shows team coverage across days and weeks. Conflicts (overlapping shifts, insufficient rest time) are flagged automatically. Published shifts sync to the Team Calendar.
Leave Management Employees submit leave requests (annual leave, sick leave, TOTP). Managers approve or reject from the Leave dashboard. The system tracks leave balances, deducts approved leave, and flags if a request would push someone into negative balance. Approved leave blocks appear in the Team Calendar so the team can see who is absent.
Expenses Employees submit expense claims with category, amount, receipt upload, and notes. Managers approve them. Approved expenses feed into the next payroll run automatically — employees are reimbursed in the payroll.
Mileage Track business mileage per trip. Mileage is reimbursed at a configurable rate (e.g. HMRC rate). Like expenses, approved mileage flows into payroll.
Overtime Log overtime hours against standard hours. Overtime is flagged on the payroll run for the manager to review before confirming pay.
Time Entries Staff can log time against specific projects, clients, or tickets. These entries inform billing and project progress.
Payroll Each payroll run:
- Pulls in approved expenses, mileage, and overtime from the current period
- Calculates gross pay (salary + extras)
- Calculates PAYE tax and National Insurance (UK-style, monthly/weekly)
- Shows a pre-run summary for review
- On confirmation, creates payslips and posts a journal entry to Accounting automatically
Recruitment
The recruitment pipeline tracks job openings and candidates through stages (Applied → Screened → Interviewed → Offered → Hired). When a candidate is marked Hired, their record can be converted directly into an employee record — no re-entry of data.
How HCM connects to the rest of the platform
Accounting: Every confirmed payroll run creates a journal entry (salary expense, PAYE liability, NI liability). No manual bookkeeping.
Field Service: Field technicians are employees. Work orders are assigned to employees and travel time can be logged as mileage in HCM.
ERP (Timesheets): Time logged in ERP projects can also surface in HCM's time-tracking view for payroll or billing purposes.
Team Calendar: Shifts, leave, and significant HR dates (e.g. probation end dates) appear on the shared Team Calendar.
Billing: Time entries linked to clients or projects can be converted to invoice line items in Billing.
Where to go next
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