HR: employees, leave and the employee portal

The HR app keeps your employee records, their documents and their leave in CRMSix. Employees ask for leave, managers approve it, and balances, holidays and week offs are counted for you. Staff who don’t use CRMSix sign in to the employee portal, which needs no CRMSix licence.

Turn on HR

HR is an add-on feature. If you don’t see HR in the app switcher, ask CRMSix support to turn it on for your organization. You can raise a ticket from Help in the app.

The HR app has the tabs Employees, Leave, Attendance, Leave calendar, Documents, HR setup and Tasks. Documents and HR setup are only for people with Manage HR.

• Manage HR.People with this permission see and edit every employee, including personal, identity and bank details; manage departments, job titles, documents, leave types, holidays and balances; invite employees to the portal; and approve anyone’s leave. Admins have it. Give it to your HR team with a custom profile.
• Managers.Approve or reject leave for the people who report to them, in the HR app or the employee portal, and see their balances.
• Everyone else.Sees the employee directory (names, departments, job titles, managers and work contacts) and who is on leave, but never personal, identity or bank details. If their CRMSix user is linked to their employee record, they see their own record and leave too.

Set up HR

1. Open HR setup → Settings. Tick the days of the week that are off (Sunday, or Saturday and Sunday), choose the month the leave year starts (January, or April for a financial year), and set the employee number prefix (EMP- unless you change it).
2. Choose the HR person. They get a task when someone without a manager asks for leave, when a document is about to expire, and when someone with a CRMSix user leaves.
3. On Leave types, choose Add the usual Indian leave types (casual, sick, earned, compensatory off and leave without pay), or add your own.
4. Add your Holidays for the year, and your Departments and Job titles.

Employees

Choose Employees → New employee. Enter their name, joining date, department, job title and manager; the employee number is given automatically unless you type one. Add their work email so leave notices and the portal invitation can reach them.

If the person also works in CRMSix, link their CRMSix user. They then see their own record and leave in the HR app, and their tasks for approving leave land in CRMSix. Employees without a CRMSix user use the employee portal instead.

An employee’s record has these tabs:

• Overview: their job, contacts and direct reports.
• Personal: date of birth, address, emergency contact, PAN, Aadhaar, UAN and bank account.
• Leave: balances, requests and every credit.
• Documents: offer letters, contracts, ID proofs and other files.
• History: joined, transfers, promotions, manager and status changes.
• Portal: their access to the employee portal.

When you change someone’s department, job title, manager or employment type, the change goes into their history with the date it takes effect. Tick It’s a promotion when a new job title is one.

Import employees from a spreadsheet

To add many people at once, choose Employees → Import (Manage HR). Save your spreadsheet as a CSV file with one employee a row and a header row, or start from Download a template.

1. Choose the file. CRMSix matches its columns to employee fields by their names (like Emp Code, Designation or Date of Joining); change any it got wrong.
2. Choose Check the file. Nothing is saved yet: you see how many employees will be added or updated, and each row’s problems.
3. Choose Import. Rows with errors are skipped; download them with their problems, fix them and import them again.

• A row with the employee number or work email of someone already in CRMSix updates them, so you can import the same file again after fixing it.
• Departments and job titles are matched by name, and added when new.
• Manager is the manager’s employee number, work email or full name, and they can be anywhere in the file.
• Dates can be YYYY-MM-DD, DD/MM/YYYY or like 15 Jan 2024. Gender can be F or M.
• Up to 1,000 employees a file.

When someone leaves

Choose Change status: Notice period while they serve notice, then Left with their last working day and the reason. When someone leaves:

• their portal access is turned off;
• leave still waiting for approval is cancelled;
• if they have a CRMSix user, the HR person gets a task to deactivate it and reassign their records. CRMSix never deactivates a user by itself.

Former employees are hidden from everyone without Manage HR. If they rejoin, change their status back to Active.

Documents

On an employee’s Documents tab, upload files up to the attachment size limit, with a category and, for things like visas or contracts, an expiry date. Tick Let the employee see it in the portal to share a document with them. The Documents tab of the app lists documents that have expired or expire soon. A set number of days before a document expires (30 unless you change it in HR setup), the HR person gets a task.

Employees can upload ID proofs, certificates and similar documents themselves in the portal. You see them on their record.

Leave types and balances

Each leave type sets how many days employees get and how they’re credited:

Carry forward moves up to that many unused days into the next leave year. A leave type can allow half days, be unpaid, be only for women or men (maternity or paternity leave), or be allowed to go below zero (leave without pay). To add or take away days for one person, open their Leave tab and choose Adjust balance; the reason is kept with the credit.

Asking for leave

1. Choose Ask for leave (on the home page, the Leave tab, or in the portal).
2. Choose the leave type: each shows how many days are left. Choose the dates, and for a half day, the morning or the afternoon.
3. Add a reason and send it.

Only working days count: week offs and holidays inside the dates are left out, so Friday to Monday is two days. Optional holidays count as working days. CRMSix doesn’t let leave overlap other leave, cross into the next leave year, or go beyond the balance (unless the leave type allows it).

People with Manage HR can ask for leave for anyone, and tick Already approved to record leave that was agreed elsewhere.

Approving leave

A request goes to the employee’s manager. If the manager uses CRMSix, they get a task; if they use the employee portal, they get an email. When there’s no manager, the HR person gets the task. Managers approve or reject from the HR home page, the Leave tab or the portal’s My team page; rejecting needs a reason. The employee gets an email either way.

Nobody approves their own leave. People with Manage HR can approve anyone else’s. An employee can cancel their request while it waits, or approved leave that hasn’t started; after that, HR can cancel it.

Attendance

Turn it on in HR setup → Attendance. Days before you turn it on are never counted as absent. Employees then check in when they start work and check out when they leave: on the HR home page or the Attendance tab if they use CRMSix, or in the employee portal.

Where people may check in

• Anywhere.From any network or place.
• From the office network.Only from the office’s public IP addresses or ranges (like 203.0.113.0/24). Ask your IT team for them.
• At an office.Only within a distance of an office you add (its latitude and longitude, from a map). The browser asks the person to share their location.

Shifts and the roster

In HR setup → Shifts, add shifts with their start and end, break, how late counts as late, and the hours worked for a full day and a half day. A shift that ends before it starts (22:00–06:00) ends the next day. Each employee works the shift on their record, else the default shift; without shifts, everyone works 9:00–18:00 with a 1-hour break. The Roster puts people on another shift for some days, such as a week of nights.

How a day counts

Checking in after the start and the grace minutes marks the day late; leaving before the end marks it left early. Hours beyond the shift (at least the shortest overtime you set) are overtime, and all the hours on a week off or holiday are.

Corrections

Forgot to check in or out, or worked away from the office? Choose Ask for a correction with the day, the times and why. It goes to the manager, like leave: a task in CRMSix, or an email for managers who use the portal, and HR when there’s no manager. Approved, it sets the day. People with Manage HR can also open any day and set its times.

Comp off and the month’s report

For a day with overtime, HR can open it and choose Give comp off (half a day or a day) to credit a leave type such as compensatory off. Download month’s report gives a CSV with each employee’s present, half, absent and leave days, late days, hours worked and overtime, ready for payroll.

Who sees attendance: people with Manage HR see everyone’s; managers see their direct reports’; everyone sees their own.

The leave calendar

Leave calendar shows a month with everyone’s approved leave (solid) and leave waiting for approval (dashed), with week offs and holidays marked. Reasons aren’t shown on the calendar. In the portal, employees see their own team and department.

The employee portal

The employee portal is for staff who don’t use CRMSix. They sign in at my.crmsix.com/people/<your sign-in name> with their own email and password, without using a CRMSix licence. There they:

• see their leave balances, ask for leave and cancel it;
• check in and out, see their month’s attendance and ask for corrections (when attendance is on);
• read announcements and see upcoming holidays, birthdays and work anniversaries;
• see holidays and their team’s leave calendar;
• raise HR requests and follow HR’s replies;
• add or change their photo (unless you turn that off), and see colleagues’ photos;
• download documents HR has shared, and upload documents HR asks for;
• update their mobile, personal email, address, blood group and emergency contact (HR changes everything else);
• if they manage people, approve or reject their team’s leave and attendance corrections, and see their team’s attendance.

1. In HR setup → Settings, tick Turn on the employee portal. You can add a welcome text for the sign-in page.
2. Open an employee’s Portal tab and choose Invite to the portal. They get an email with a link to choose a password, valid for 7 days.
3. Use Turn access off to stop someone signing in. Access is turned off automatically when they leave.

Announcements and upcoming events

Post company news, notices and policies in HR → Announcements (Manage HR). Each one shows in the employee portal (on the home page and under Updates) and on the HR home page.

• Show to: everyone, or one department.
• Show from and Show until: schedule it ahead, and let it end on its own. Empty means from today, and until you delete it.
• Pin keeps it at the top. Preview shows what employees see today.

Upcoming events list the next holidays, birthdays and work anniversaries, with photos. Birthdays show only the day and month, never the year. To leave birthdays or anniversaries out, untick them in HR setup → Settings → Events and photos. People who have left aren’t listed.

HR requests

Employees ask HR about payroll, leave, letters or anything else with HR help → Raise HR request in the portal. Each request becomes a case in your HR queue, so your HR team works it in Cases like any other case, with its milestones and workflow rules.

1. In Setup → Queues, create a queue for HR (for example “HR”) and add the HR team as its members.
2. In HR setup → Settings → HR requests, tick Employees can raise HR requests in the portal and choose that queue. Edit the list of what requests can be about, one per line.

• HR requests are private. Only admins, people with Manage HR, the HR person, the queue’s members and whoever the case is assigned to can see them, even when cases are shared with everyone.
• The employee gets an email when the request arrives. HR’s public comments are emailed to them and show in the portal; internal comments never do.
• Employees can reply, mark a request as resolved and reopen it.

Sandboxes and data export

Employee records, documents, leave, attendance, announcements and HR requests are never copied into sandboxes. Except for HR requests, which are cases, they aren’t part of Settings → Data Export either, because they hold personal details.

What’s next

Recruitment and onboarding, and payroll are planned for later releases of HR.