Back in September, we had enhanced the Attendance and Leave Policy management system, enabling better administration of employee leaves and attendance. Now the sumHR engineers have further enhanced the Attendance feature by including location options for clocking in and the Late Mark policy.

Select Clock In Location
sumHR now enables employees to select the location when clocking in. They have the option to select either Office, Home, or Outdoor Duty. In case your company has chosen the IP restriction option for attendance, the “Office” option will be disabled for employees if they login from an IP not defined as your office IP in the system.

Late Mark Policy
Using sumHR, you can now configure the Late Mark policy also. This option will be available when you create new Shifts. Go to Setup Company (under Manage, Left Navigation bar) >> Shifts (Under Attendance).

Note: For previously created Shifts, click Edit for the particular shift to set your company’s Late Mark policy.

Here’s how you can configure the Late Mark policy:
- Select Enabled for Late Mark Policy (disabled by default).
- You can also set the Number of Late Marks (Zero by default).
- Choose Late Mark Leave Deduction (half day or full day)
- Select Late Mark Leave Type i.e. the type of leave you want to deduct from the employees’ quota if he/she crosses the Late Mark limits set by you in the previous two options.

These enhancements to the leave and attendance management systems of sumHR, make the Attendance Policy Management for your organization easier and flexible. Do feel free to share any suggestions for the Attendance enhancements in the comments section below.

Related articles

• Attendance Feature Enhanced: Attendance Policy Management Added
• Bulk Import Attendance for All Employees, Export Details, and Edit Attendance
• Configure Different Leave Policies for Employees based on Departments, Office Location or Employee Type

It’s been quite some time since we have made enhancements to the basic features of sumHR. We have received a lot of feedback and while our engineering team has been hard at work developing the HR software, they’ve made some nifty but important changes to it. Here are the two exciting enhancements we rolled out this week:

Attendance

1. The attendance clock-in option has been provided on the dashboard page itself for easy access and quick action.

2. Tracking attendance for ‘work from home’ and ‘out duty’ is now easy and possible! Employees can now send a request to their reporting managers for making changes to their attendance record. Any modifications to previous date attendance logs can be requested by employees for managerial review/approval. Here are the details:

A user has to go to “Attendance” (under Dashboard, Left Navigation bar) and click on the blue-colored Request Button (below the green-colored Clock In/Out Button). On the pop-up form, the employee can select the Request Type – Clock in Request (for the same day) or Update Attendance (for changing past logs). After selecting the type, the user has to fill all the details in the form and click the ‘Submit’ button to send it to their reporting manager for approval.

And also, we’ve got a much awaited feature to modify the primary email address and change the self-service status!

Admins can now change the default email addresses of the users. Go to “Company Directory” (under Dashboard, Left Navigation bar) and select the employee whose details you want to edit. Click the “More Options” button and select ‘Change Self Service & Email’. Enter the new email id. In case you want to change the account to non-Self Service, select ‘No’ from the dropdown menu next to Status.
Note: Only admins can change the email address for users.

We are big fans of your feedback. Do feel free to share your views about these enhancements.

HR software are good at documenting information. However, what good is it if you cannot export the data for analysis? For any manager, being able to generate a “report” makes all the difference. Carrying forward this though, we have enhanced the reimbursement feature, allowing Admins to export the reimbursement details.

Go to “Setup Company” (under Manage, Left Navigation bar) >> click Reimbursements (Under Export) to go to the Reimbursements Report page. On this page, you can either select the pre-defined durations (for 1,3 and 6 months) or select a custom date range, as per your requirements. Click download after selecting the duration and voila! The data will be available for download as a .xls file.

In case you have any feedback/suggestions about exporting details of reimbursements, feel free to share it in the comments section below.

For any HR manager, employee data management is as important as employee management. Since sumHR also doubles up as an employee management system, we decided to enhance it even further for the Admin users to enable them to download all employee data from the system.

So, how does this aspect of employee data management work?

To download all employee data, go to:

Manage (lower left navigation) >> Click on Setup Company >> Click on Employees (under Export section) >> Click the Download button.

This will export a spreadsheet with every piece of data present in the Employee Profile page of all your employees.

At sumHR, we’re glad that our cloud-based software allows for better HR management. With this new enhancement we’ve tried to make it a cinch for HR managers to manage and download all employee data for their perusal, at any time.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below about this enhancement to the employee data management system.

Related articles

• Moving HR Management from Spreadsheets to HR Software: For Startups/SMBs
• Employee Engagement Activities in Startups & Small Businesses
• Bulk Import Attendance for All Employees, Export Details, and Edit Attendance

The year 2012 has been somewhat of a landmark year for sumHR. Multiple important features were added to the HR software – some of them changed the way you look at HR. We thought it would be unfair if we didn’t close the year with a bang. Here’s our way of ringing in the New Year:

New Look

Our endeavor to offer a great user experience continues as we have completely redesigned the product look-n-feel. The new design offers a modern look-n-feel, taking the user experience to a completely new level. You will notice many more nifty changes in the next few days.

Enhancements to Permissions (for Admins)

Empower your managers and team leads with even more options to manage your company’s sumHR account. You can edit and set permissions at a more granular level, especially when it comes to editing employee details and sub-functions of Company Setup.

Go to Setup Company (under Manage, Left Navigation bar) >> Manage Roles (Under Permissions).

Introducing Privacy Control for Employees’ Profiles

Employees can now select the information they want to keep private or public. When entering information such as phone numbers, email ids, and birthday, they can choose who can view that information using a dropdown menu, with options to select “Everyone / Team or Peers / Only me”.

Pre-define Designations

As an admin, you can now pre-define designations for better management and one time edit. This will help you avoid typos or incorrect designations.

Go to Setup Company (under Manage, Left Navigation bar) >> Designations (Company).

Adding Business Units

Many organizations have different business units for which different employees work for. We have now introduced an option for you to add Business Units as well.

Go to Setup Company (under Manage, Left Navigation bar) >> Business Units (Company).

Please, feel free to share your feedback in the comments section below. And yes, the Payroll feature will be launched soon. Keep watching this space for more details.

We know that you were worried about sumHR being in the quiet mode. But we were not! We were busy making gazillion enhancements for you folks. Ok, gazillion might look like an overstatement but yes, we have made several major improvements, including some long pending enhancements to the Attendance & Leave Management features.

Below is a comprehensive list of enchantments made with respect to features such as Leave and Attendance Management, Calendar, Directory and Organization Structure:

Attendance Management

1. “Reports For” Filter in Export Data: A ‘Filter By’ option is added for attendance data export. You can now export attendance information based on individual employees, departments, shifts, and locations.
2. Clock-Out Reminder: sumHR will send employees a notification email, reminding them IF they ‘forgot’ to Clock-Out yesterday/last working day. Thanks to this notification, confusion about ‘absent’ marking can be avoided and fewer employees will give the “forgot to clock out” excuse.

Leave Management

1. “Reports For” Filter in Export Data:A ‘Filter By’ option is added for leave data export. You can now export leave information based on individual employees, departments, shifts, and locations.
2. Extra Info Description box: An extra description box added when setting up leave policies. You can now add notes/disclaimers to leave policies, thus enhancing your leave management offering more info to employees.
3. Option to set leave carry forward rules in %: Option to include information in percentage format added to Unused Leaves Carryover. You now have an option to specify the number of unused leaves carried forward in a percentage format. This will empower your company to make your leave structure more flexible.
4. Public Holidays for specific office location: Holidays can now be configured as per the office locations.
5. Minor bug fixes:
   • holiday changes and attendance logs – when dates of public holidays are changed by admins after the holiday has already passed, the attendance log is synchronized and updated.
   • carryover option and pro-rating leaves.

Calendar

1. The Calendar no longer shows ‘Pending Leaves’.

Organization Structure

1. Define company structure: from the admin section, now you can create an organized company structure. You can create Business Units, under them you can add Departments, and finally you can select which Designation (job title) falls under which Department.
2. Organization Structure: Earlier you could only see the reporting hierarchy, but now you can actually see your company’s organization structure, in “Business unit” >> “Department” >> “Designation” view.

Directory

In the Directory, you can now directly update designations and business units

1. for multiple employees using ‘Select a Bulk Option’ button.
2. for individual employees using ‘More Options’ button.

Employee Welcome Email

1. Content changes made to the welcome email text to make your HRM system (sumHR, of course) more appealing to your employees.

Yes, these are quite a lot of enhancements in one shot compared to our usual standards, but hold on to your horses, there’s more coming in the next few days. This is just one of several such feature enhancement releases we’ll be announcing.

But we’re sure that these changes, especially to the attendance and leave management features will definitely make your life easy. Feel free to share any feedback using the comments section below.

Most teenagers in India dream of getting into an IIT and/or IIM. Of lakhs of young Indians, who sit for the entrance exams, only a few hundred make it to these institutions. In addition to IIT, IIMs, the likes of BITS-Pilani and NIFT are popular too. While a plush job after graduation is one reason for this immense popularity, another reason is an ideal atmosphere that encourages entrepreneurship in India. A general perception is that most top entrepreneurs in India are from these top institutes.

What’s more, a trend that has been observed these days is that it is easier for someone from an IIT or an IIM to get funding for their entrepreneurial dreams. The current startup ecosystem is dotted with success stories of top entrepreneurs who graduated from either an IIM, IIT, BITS and the likes. Nevertheless, as we said, there is a general perception unless you are an IIT/IIM alumni, it is tough to be a successful entrepreneur. We have now drawn up a list of top entrepreneurs in India who have not been to any of these top institutes yet have gone on to create some wonderful companies and built great teams.

Here is a list of top entrepreneurs in India who were successful without attending an IIT or an IIM:

* In alphabetical order

We are sure you enjoyed reading this list about the top entrepreneurs in India. There are hundreds of budding entrepreneurs in India (a majority of them wannabepreneurs) who haven’t been to a top institute like an IIT or an IIM or XLRI or the ISB. This list also tries to serve as an inspiration for these promising entrepreneurs who can take a cue from the top Indian entrepreneurs above.

Being a startup that serves other startups and small businesses, sumHR closely interacts with various important stakeholders of the Indian startup ecosystem including VCs, most of whom are positive about mentoring startups and entrepreneurs from non-IIT or non-IIM backgrounds. The perception of startups in India as a whole is changing and various platforms are emerging for just about anyone who has a good business idea, regardless of the educational institute he/she has studied (or dropped out). This article is merely an attempt to break the common misconception observed in the startup ecosystem of India, that ‘only entrepreneurs who’ve studied at such institutes can manage to succeed in their enterprises’.

Please, feel free to use the comment section to add any top Indian entrepreneur that you feel has scaled up and succeeded without going to a top education institute such as IIT, IIM, ISB, etc.

PS: Like these guys, the sumHR team too is composed of non-IIT and non-IIM guys. And yes, they aim to get into this list someday.

Disclaimer: IITs & IIMs are premier institutes, which produce some very talented professionals, and we have high regards for these and similar institutes. While this list is inspired by actual entrepreneurs who have NOT attended/graduated from an institute like IIT/IIM, it doesn’t mean to imply, in any way whatsoever, that these entrepreneurs have anything against institutes like IIT/IIMs. On the contrary, some of these entrepreneurs are guest/visiting faculties are these institutes and have high regards for these institutes, and often look out to hire talent professionals graduating from these institutes.

These great entrepreneurs built successful companies with the help of talented teams. If you are an entrepreneur looking out for talented individuals for your startup, click here.

We are delighted to announce the launch of a dedicated learning module in our support section – Understanding and Using sumHR. While the support center has been there for a while, we decided to add this extra module since many customers requested FAQs that would specifically help the employees when they start using the HRM software.

Nearly everyone who has used sumHR agrees that it is one of the most easy to use HR software. This is because our engineers make it a point to focus on the user experience too, along with writing some beautiful code that makes the backend robust.

As you know whenever an organization, big or small, moves to new software or installs it for the first time, there is always a dire need of support, especially for the users who are going to use it. This is especially true for HRM software as it is used by the employees each and every day and has several important things related to it, such as leaves, attendance, payroll, etc. All users who sign up (usually CEOs & HR managers) for sumHR are quite excited about our HR product but usually this enthusiasm is not shared by their employees since there is a perception that any new software would be difficult to use.

To ensure that all employees of our customers share the same level of eagerness, we decided to invest extra time and resources to create the “Understanding and Using sumHR” learning module. We realize that a little bit of handholding is always necessary, and our Admin users cannot solve each and every single query of their employees. You can visit the Q&A module over here: http://support.sumhr.com. We encourage you to share it with all your employees.

sumHR is evolving and every few weeks we’ve been adding new features. The same applies for our support section too. We are continually updating it as per the feedback we receive from our customers. Do feel free to share your thoughts via the comments section below.

A few days ago, we had made enhancements to some of the major features of sumHR, such as Leave and Attendance Management, Calendar, Directory, and Organization Structure. As you know, our engineers continually test the software and work on enhancing the product wherever possible. This is in addition to working on bug fixes and suggestions given by our customers.

This time around, admins can expect even more flexibility and an improved leave feature. Here’s a list of the latest enhancements and some important bug fixes:

MORE POWER TO ADMINS

Option to delete anything in streams: An admin can now delete any message, question, polls, and events. This enhancement will make it easy to moderate the company’s in-house social network on sumHR.

Apply for leaves for anyone in the company: Earlier admins could only apply for leave on behalf of people who reported to them. Now an admin can apply for leaves for absolutely anyone in the company, including employees who are superior to the admin in the organizational hierarchy.

View leaves for anyone in the company: Previously admins could view only those leaves in which they were involved, either as managers or Auto-CC recipients. Now admins can view any leave across the company, irrespective of whether they are involved in it or not. You can find a detailed explanation about managing leaves on sumHR’s Support Center.

LEAVE POLICY UPDATES

Option to start accrual of leaves at the beginning or end of the month: Earlier when creating a leave policy, the accrual option was fixed at “start of the month”. This meant that leaves would begin accruing for that policy at the start of every new month. Based on customer feedback, we have now given an additional option. Admins can now choose whether to:

a) begin accrual of leaves at the start of every new month OR
b) accrue the leaves at/after end of the month (beginning of next month).

Improved balance counters: Previously, the employee’s leave page would only display the current available balance along with the leaves credited so far in the current year to the admins. Now we have included an additional piece of info to the counters: Balance count of Leaves carried forward from previous year.

BUG FIXES

After the launch of some major enhancements in our leave carry forward feature and leave balance import feature, we received some error/bug reports from customers immediately. These bugs have been resolved along with some minor fixes to optimize the leave calculations system.

We’re sure that these new additional Admin powers, along with the leave policy accrual update and miscellaneous bug fixes will further enhance your sumHR experience. Feel free to share any feedback in the comments section below.

Back in May, we had rolled out truckloads of enhancements, especially giving more power to the admins. The last few weeks have seen a lot of activity at sumHR too. A swanky new website, more new team members, and customers from around the world! Yes, the last bit surprised us too, but now we’re seeing customers signing up from countries like Malaysia, Nigeria, Turkey, UAE, and even the exotic Malta. But, while all these “new” things were happening, the feedback kept pouring in from a lot of our customers, especially regarding the attendance feature and requests for a biometric system to track attendance of employees.

Attendance 2.0

Let me begin first by saying, I’m sorry for all the bugs/issues some of you have faced with the existing Attendance features.

The Attendance module is one feature which gave us a tough time so far. A lot of the feedback and suggestions from customers for this feature, including things like:

- Separate shift and policy management.
- Weekly off variations (alternate Saturdays, second & fourth Saturday off, etc).
- A bug free, enhanced, and powerful “Late marking policy” system.

Well, we heard you all the way and decided to focus all our energies to revamp the Attendance module features. And, I’m happy to let you know that we’re ready to launch it now. At present, our QA team is testing it rigorously to make sure you don’t face the issues you’ve faced so far.

We rolling out the new and improved Attendance Management features next week.

Biometric System

A huge number of sumHR users sounded us off about some peculiar difficulties they faced with the “online” method of marking attendance. A lot of the customers said that their employees were not getting into the habit of using the ‘online’ method for clocking in/out daily. A few administrators (HR Managers) from larger companies also pointed out cases where their employees used the online method for “proxy attendance”!

One of the reasons we built the Attendance & Leave modules was to do away with the complexities of machine-based systems, because the combination of “machines based logging” and then “software based monitoring” didn’t work well together. Why so?
1) We didn’t want to burden HR Managers/Admin users to download and format data from the biometric attendance system and then again import/upload it to sumHR.

2)Data is not accessible real time, as there is no direct connection between sumHR software and the third party device.

3) The biometric device might throw our data in a different format than which sumHR is able to read.

But we believe that every problem has a solution, and that’s why we’ve decided to get a pre-integrated biometric device and make your life easier. After a thorough R&D, we finalized on market leaders eSSL, who are the largest in India in terms of volume and distribution network. The device that we finalized is one of their most advanced and robust models called X990, which includes a RFID card reader too.

What to expect from this biometric system for attendance?
1) Seamless integration with your sumHR account: Every time your employee comes to office, he/she can punch his/her finger into the biometric attendance device and their sumHR account will be updated real time.

2) Discounted pricing of biometric system for sumHR users: The standard pricing for this machine for end-consumers is around Rs 15,000 to Rs 18,000 in the market. We’ve signed up as “dealers” with eSSL which gives us a “special pricing” advantage from them. Hence, we decided to pass on this benefit of lower prices to you, our customers. We’ll be providing the device to you at the same price as we’re incurring to buy and deploy the biometric system at your office. The pricing of the Biometric Fingerprint Reader System for attendance is Rs.12,000 only (one time purchase).

Deliveries begin next week – so grab your device right away!We are starting delivery for the X990 biometric attendance machines to all customers who’re placing orders for them. It will be dispatched directly to your office address. We will offer complete support over phone/video conference when you are installing the device, so you don’t need to worry about that either.
Note to international customers: Just hang on for some more time, I’m trying to figure out a similar solution for you as well. I’ll keep you updated, promise!

With the biometric system and the new attendance features of sumHR, your attendance/leave management concerns will be a thing of the past. Feel free to share your feedback about the same in the comments section below. Alternatively, just shoot me a mail on jay [at} sumHR.com or dial +91 922 3131 202.

The last few weeks have been crazy at sumHR. Not only have we been busy at work to ensure that our users get more flexibility with basic HRM functions, we’ve also made a lot of improvements to the site. We now wanted to share the news that Attendance 2.0 is live and we’ve launched and started shipping the biometric systems. In addition, a Roster page has been introduced on sumHR for better employee management.

Attendance 2.0: Completely Revamped Attendance Module

The previous avatar of the sumHR attendance module had a couple of areas which received a lot of feedback and needed enhancements:
a) Ability to handle high volume attendance logging, resulting in frequent bugs/errors/issues.
b) Critical limitations in design that restricted scaling up the shifts/policies as teams grew bigger.

With Attendance 2.0, we’ve not only improved upon the above two points, but also added a bonus item – seamless integration of biometric fingerprint readers and RFID access machines. The new attendance module provides the following features:

1) Separate Shift and Policy Management
Earlier, there was just one way to create, log, and track attendance for employees in sumHR – through “shifts”. The shifts feature included the attendance policy options as well. This limited the flexibility an HR/admin would need when they’d like to assign different attendance rules, for people coming within the same shift, or vice versa. Hence, now we have provided separate options to create shifts and policies, individually. You can create unlimited number of shifts and policies, both separately, independent of each other.

2) Weekly Offs or Weekly Off Cycles
In our earlier setup, you had the option to define weekly offs at Department level. This was like a blanket rule which restricted the option for you to assign different weekly offs for different people within the same department. Not only that, you also didn’t have the option to create more variations in the weekly offs, such as alternate Saturdays, even/odd days, first/last Saturdays, etc. Now, you can create unlimited unique weekly off cycles, separately. They are no longer linked to departments. This means, you can create and assign different weekly off cycles to people from the same department. What’s more, these weekly off cycles no longer have to be plain vanilla types Saturday off. They can be alternate, odd, even, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – and not just Saturdays, you can configure it for any day of the week.

3) Shift Assignment & Weekly Off Cycles at User/Employee Level
Previously, when you created shifts, you had to also define “who is this shift for” in the same process, right there itself. Though it was a powerful method of assigning shifts, it didn’t allow exclusions. So, if you assigned a shift to the “Marketing department”, you’d end up including everyone in that department within the same shift. What if you’d like to assign 9 out of 10 people from the marketing team in that shift, but not that one person. You couldn’t. Hence, we decided to move out the shift assignment into the “Directory” – at end user/employee level. Now, you can create as many shifts, policies, IP networks, weekly off cycles, etc. as you want, all in the manage/administration section, and then assign them to employees from the Directory – in any combination, individually or in bulk.

Launch of Biometric Time & Attendance Monitoring Device

This is kind of a milestone for sumHR. Being an online software company, it was always going to be challenge creating a desktop application and then integrating a hardware system with it – in order to sync stuff onto our online software. But we took the challenge up for the sake of our passion – solving problems in HR.

Device Details
Depending on your requirements, we have two options for biometric devices, one with access control (U990) and one without access control (X990). Both these biometric time attendance systems will have the ability to store 3,000 fingerprint templates and 1,00,000 transaction records, and even offer battery backup options.

Benefits of Biometric Devices
Basically, now companies can not only use the web-based clock-in/out system which comes in-built in their sumHR Accounts, but they can also integrate biometric fingerprint reader devices which will be implemented/deployed at their own office premises. These devices which we provide have been carefully chosen after R&D to ensure they’re the best suitable for this job. Using the biometric device, you can ensure practically 100% proof of attendance (which was still a bit dicey in the online system).

How It Works
Once you purchase the device, we will ship it to your office address. Once you have the biometric system, using remote desktop we will set it up to work on your office LAN. Then we will also install a small desktop-based application on a PC/Laptop in your office. This desktop app will communicate and retrieve all attendance logs from the device, and push it up into the cloud – onto your sumHR account.

(NOTE: For those new to the concept of biometric devices or wish to learn more, we have created a dedicated page in our Support section that explains everything in detail.)

Roster Page

Regardless of the size of the company, an HR manager always needs to have data at his/her fingertips. To better enable Admin users of sumHR to have easy access to information for faster analysis, we’ve created the Roster page. What it basically does is allow you to swiftly view, search and manage employee data of different rosters, at department levels, as per designations, locations, and employee type. The Roster page can be accessed by logging into your sumHR account and clicking on Roster (third on list, after Directory) on the left navigation bar.

Usage examples:
1) You want to know the leave summary of all engineers in your company.
- Select Leaves Summary (under Leaves Roster) from the first dropdown and Engineers (under Designation) from the second dropdown menu.

2) You want to know the birthdays of all employees in your Kolkata office.
- Select Birthday Roster from the first dropdown menu and Kolkata (under Locations) from the second dropdown menu.

The new attendance features, launch of biometric devices, and the roster page will make your sumHR experience better and efficient. We *heart* feedback. If you have any, do share it with us via the comment section below or drop in a mail.

Whether in business or in your personal life, the word ‘free’ will always draw your attention. In this article, I’ll talk to you about how to decide whether ‘free’ is the right choice for you, and the advantages and disadvantages of using a free HR software for your small/medium business or enterprise.

How to decide whether free HR software is apt for you?

Today, almost every budding organization has realized that spreadsheets are not the best way to manage HR operations. They’re a big hassle in more ways than one. So, moving over to a technology tool is the only answer to your HR woes. However, for small/medium companies, cost plays a decisive factor when choosing the ideal HR Software. This is where the ‘free’ factor plays a big role on their minds.

When evaluating a free HR software, you should keep in mind the following points/questions:

Do the features of the HR software match your current HR processes?

Often, the free HR software might appear suitable but when you dwell deeper and explore its features inside, you may find that it lacks compatibility with your existing HR processes. You can ignore this point if you don’t have any fixed HR processes and are willing to compromise/change them for the software (though I doubt this generally happens).

Does it have the capability to adapt/customize to your requirements?

Let’s say the software has the general features you need, but will the features have any customization options. By customization, I don’t specifically mean changing the way the HRM is designed to work, but I’m referring more about tweaks and adjustments. HR software should allow you to make granular changes to the features in order to control how your HR operations work.

Is there an option for employees to join the HR process?

This can be a very important aspect for any organization today. The basic objective of any software is to reduce the burden/load on the management, but how can one achieve this if all the work is meant to be done by the administrators themselves. The general term in HR software industry for this aspect is “Employee Self-Service”. If the free HR software features Employee Self-Service, it means employees can contribute to their own HR management by updating their profiles, applying for leaves, etc. What’s more, it gives the organization an option to distribute HR work and information amongst employees more efficiently.

How user-friendly is the free HR software for you, your HR team, and your employees in general?

The software should visually appeal to you, not only by way of appearance but also in ease-of-use. Is it easy to understand, navigate and use? How difficult is the setting up process? Answers to these questions can often spell the future of this software in your organization. The more old-fashioned, difficult to setup, and complex the product is, the less likely your colleagues will accept/adapt it.

Will you get any support from the providers of free HR software, if you’re stuck anywhere or you need any clarifications?

Support! This is the backbone of any product or service a customer receives. Whether you buy a car or outsource your website development, one of the top things on your mind will always be “after-sales” service. What kind of support commitments will there be? What will be the availability of the support staff? What channels of communication can you use to contact them? Buying and using software from the internet can be a whole different experience, with the kind of support you get.

What will be your investment? What will be the costs to buy/implement/run the software?

Yes, I’m aware that this article is about “free” Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS), but like the age old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. What I mean to say is, the HR software may be offered free but more often than not, there’s always a catch. Things like, limited features for free but you have to pay-up for the ‘real stuff’. Let’s say that there’s really no catch, but what about implementation? Wouldn’t there be some cost/effort in customizing it? And will the support be free too? Assuming you’ve decided to go for it, won’t there be some cost of hosting it online or in your premises? This may be the last question in this list but it’s probably the only one spells the difference between “Yes” or “No”.

Advantages of Free HR management Software

I think this is the toughest part for me to write – figuring out the ‘advantages’ of free HR software. I’ll be honest, I’ve done a lot of research online about the various options available out there, and I really can’t list down any notable advantages in this case. Let me make it easier for you – when evaluating the HR Software using the above questions, if you get a favorable/positive answer, just add that as an advantage to my list below.

My list of advantages is short:

1) It’s free

That’s it! No one time cost, no recurring costs, no license fees, no AMC, etc.

Disadvantages of Choosing Free HR Management Software

Now this is where the ‘free-ness’ advantage takes a big hit. The list of disadvantages of using a free HR management software can be intimidating, to say the least:

1) Limited features

When the objective is no-profit, the effort spent by the developer of a free software is bound to be biased too. Features in free HR software will mostly be limited or always come with the catch of paid-upgrades or a “pro/paid” option.

2) Low or scrappy product quality

Yes, I know it’s wrong to generalize but whatever little I’ve seen so far, I’m pretty confident that the free options are mostly not built to last. After all, they’re offering it to you for free!

3) Customization can be tough

If the software is a standard package built with little or no customization option, it’s anyway a big disadvantage. Now imagine if the scope for customization is transferred on your shoulder, wouldn’t you have to pay a bomb to local developers for re-engineering it to your needs?

4) Lackluster looks, mediocre user-friendliness

Think of it this way, there’s always going be a major difference between a home-video and a studio production, right? The same way, any software made with no business interest and offered free, may not get a lot of attention in the “looks & appearance” department.

5) Little or no upgrades

Most of the times, there will be no one out there looking after the up-keep of this free product. This means, you won’t see any upgrades to the features or technologies too. Of course, unless the free HR software is being produced and managed by an open-source community, for whom this may be a part-time hobby/pet project.

6) Most probably, no support

What if you’re stuck somewhere while setting up? This is not a simple Gmail/Facebook account we’re talking about. It’s a software for your organization. You’re bound to need help/assistance from time to time. But when someone’s giving you something free, how much more can you expect?

7) Security/Safety guarantees

If the free HR software will be web-based, you’ll be transferring all your data online to their servers. This means, your data will be in their hands. Though software companies will mostly put in some basic measures to ensure security/safety of your data, but since they’re doing it for free, I doubt it will be a great wall of China, if you know what I mean.

Conclusion: To Go For Free HR Software or Not?

I think the best way to take this decision is to evaluate your needs first. You may get help from the list of questions I’ve mentioned above. Let’s say that you’ve evaluated and you find something suitable, don’t jump the gun. Make sure you take a test-drive. Most software these days have a “Free Trial” option available, so make maximum use of it. There’s no better way to judge than using it real-time. Though I’m confident that there’s hardly any free software out there which provides support, I’d urge you to see if there’s any community/forum which caters to that particular software. At the end of the day, you must remember that this free HR software will be the backbone of your company’s HR management processes. Irrespective of whether you choose the free option or the paid one, make sure you take an informed and long-term decision.

A few weeks ago, we had introduced the roster page for sumHR. The update had all our customers excited, and now we have made some really amazing additions to the HR product. We have also worked hard to enhance the back-end technology. Here’s more information about the whole set of updates:

Attendance reports galore

We’ve added a whole gamut of attendance reports in your account, available with just a click! These attendance reports and their formats have been prepared after gathering lot of feedback from our customers who are totally hooked onto our attendance features. Here’s a list of new attendance reports which you can access from your Admin accounts:

More powerful directory options
(view and re-activate in-active employees)

We’ve spruced up the directory with some nifty little options which can give you a lot more power and quick info.

(1) Toggle between 2 views, Active Employees / In-active Employees

This gives you the quick access to all your historical employee database information. All employees that you’ve ever had in your organization (who’re not longer working with you) will appear in the In-active employees view.

(2) Re-activate in-active employees

If you find yourself in a situation where an ex-employee is re-joining your organization, don’t worry about creating a new profile for him/her all over again. Just head to the In-active Employees view in your Directory and re-activate that employee’s old profile once again.

(3) Real time search number in Employee Directory

As the Directory is the central location from where you view, search and manage all your employee database, now you’ll be able to always know what’s the number of employees currently displaying in the directory. This will be very helpful when you’re filtering the data based on departments, employee types, office locations, etc.

Introduction of “Gearman” for data processing and cron job optimization

Alright, so I’m sure that this one is an unusual update for most of you, given that I usually only make announcements about features, functionality, etc., and seldom mention any new back-end technologies. But since Gearman will be helping us solve a couple of very critical recurring problems, I decided to draw a little of your attention to it too.

Recently, with the surge in companies signing up for sumHR (which is very good news), we’ve also been experiencing some issues in managing the hundreds/thousands of daily actions being carried out by all users. This caused 2 major issues:
1) attendance logs were not getting updated automatically every night (as they should be)
2) bulk actions carried out from the directory were not executing completely

In comes Gearman! It’s basically an open source application framework which can be used to distribute large volume of data driven tasks in such a fashion that nothing drops out of process. Using the Gearman technology, large tasks that involve lot of updates/modification/executions on our processors, can be done more quickly and completely. As a result of the Gearman addition, we’re making sumHR more powerful in terms of running cron jobs (automated system generated tasks) and perform large bulk actions more smoothly and efficiently.

Credits for building this open source framework goes to Brian Aker and Eric Day.

Hope these updates and additions make your HR management, even more enjoyable!

It’s been nearly six months since we rolled out a major update for sumHR. As usual, we have been super busy and this time we really wanted to get one of the most important modules of an HR software running — payroll! We are delighted to announce its beta launch, as well as a few more important updates:

Beta Launch Of Payroll Module (v1.0)

It’s been an embarrassingly long time since we had initially promised to launch this feature, and it’s also been an extremely long wait for all of you who’ve requested the payroll module. To be honest, we had under-estimated the requirements of this feature before announcing about it. Nevertheless, we’ve just released a basic version of our payroll module today. You can check it out in your account under the “administration” section.

What you can expect from the Beta Payroll Module (v1.0):
1) New payroll profile page (for every employee).
2) Define different salary structures.
3) Define pay cycle (monthly or custom date).
4) Leave Without Pay (LWP) / Loss Of Pay (LOP) days.
5) Consider actual rent for HRA exemption.
6) Consider exemption for Medical allowance.
7) Calculate Leave Travel Allowance (LTA).
8) Consider deduction for investment for tax calculation.
9) Calculate Employee PF.
10) Generate payslip (view online and PDF).
11) Create individual transactions for employees (over & above salary).
12) Employee IT Declarations page.

This is only a “basic” and most fundamental release which may not be power-packed and feature-rich but enough to get your payroll work done (read: general salary slips). We cannot thank you all enough for your patience, support and feedback in building this feature.

NOTE: We’ve not yet created tutorials or guides to help you do it yourself so, please contact us (or email support@sumhr.com) to get your payroll settings configured.

Compensatory Off

This is a really cool new feature we’ve added to our leave module. In fact, a much needed feature and a highly demanded one too by most of our users. So, the key options and characteristics of the Compensatory Off feature as below:

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New Account Page

Several customers were constantly requesting for a page where they can get a breakup of their costs, and a list of options to choose their required HR modules. In keeping with this demand, we’ve launched a new Account page. Using this page, an Administrator will be able to:

1) Account status – there’s an account summary section on this page, which provides basic info about the account status like “Account creation date”, “Account expiry/renewal date”, etc.
2) Choose to switch ON/OFF HR modules – we’ve always maintained that our product is designed with the policy to give customers the power to “use what you need” and “pay for what you use”. So now, on this page you will get a list of all our available HR modules, which you can choose to turn ON or OFF. Whatever is turned ON will become visible to everyone in the account and the moment any module is turned OFF, every feature related with that module will become inaccessible to everyone in the account.
3) Account Summary – this particular section provides a snapshot of the some very vital stats related to your account, such as “No. of Modules selected”, “Price per employee/month”, “Total no. of employees with/without self-service”, and a “total monthly subscription cost”.
4) Administrators – we’ve launched a new section to allow you to define duplicate administrators in your account. The users you specify here will become full-power administrators.

Just click on the “Accounts” button in the top navigation bar and you’ll land on your own Account page.

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Automatic Division Of Paid/Unpaid Leaves

Up till now, our leave policy features were such that whenever employees wanted to apply for leaves exceeding their available balance, and given that the rules for that policy permit applying for such leaves, the employee had to apply for 2 separate leave applications. One for the paid duration of leave, and another leave application to signify the unpaid duration.

This particular process caused lot of inconvenience to employees and the HR teams with our customers. Hence, we decided to build an enhancement which will automatically divide a leave application (once approved) into its paid and unpaid duration as per the employee’s available leave balance. Of course, this is assuming that the administrator has enabled “over-utilization” rule in the leave policy, and kept condition as “count excess leave as unpaid”.

Here’s a sample of how this feature takes effect in your leave application:

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We are sure that the Payroll feature will help you better manage employee salaries and do away with those unreliable spreadsheets. In case you have any feedback/suggestions, feel free to us the comments section below.

Once again there’s been a considerable gap between the last time I emailed you about any new features. I don’t know if you missed hearing from me, but whenever there’s a long gap you can be sure it’s only because we’ve got surprises coming for you!

This time, we’ve got enhancements on almost all modules. Some are big improvements while some are small but all of them are bound to be useful to you.

Employee Database Management

Customize Employee Exit Reasons (when Deactivating Employees):
Earlier, whenever employees resigned or were terminated from your company, you had to choose from a preset list of resignation or termination reasons. A lot of customers requested for more flexibility in managing the list of reasons to be specified during deactivation. So, here you go – now you’ve got the option to not only edit the existing list of reasons we provide but also add an unlimited list of your own reasons for resignation or termination of employees.

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Employee Exit Report:
Ok, so some of you may say, “What’s the use of adding or editing resignation/termination reasons if there’s no statistics to understand why people leave or get fired in my company”, right? You bet! Presenting a whole new report which will give you a detailed view of which employees have left your company, reason for their departure, dates of exit, who deactivated their profile, and more! We’ve called it the Employee Exit Report.

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Leave Applications Tracking

New Leave History Table:
We used to have a leave history table which displayed information in number of past days format, like leaves taken in last 30-60-90-120 days, etc. We got feedback that it’s causing confusion and so we trashed that table! All employees will now get a swish new Leave History Table on their leaves page, which looks something like this:

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I’m sure this format will make things accurate and easy to understand.

New and Improved Leave Policy Form:
This one is for the Administrators. Though we give an exhaustive list of options and flexibilities while creating leave policies in sumHR, we’ve heard feedback that the leave policy creation form (the one which helps define leave rules), is often very confusing and ambiguous. And, we couldn’t agree more! So we decided to give a face list to the form and add a lot of help-text, re-word the labels, and make it more on the question-answer approach. Here’s a peek into it:

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Specify the Limit (in days) for Past Dated Leave Applications:
We’ve also added a small but powerful flexibility to the “past dated leaves” rule in the leave policy feature. This option will now let you control the limit of past-dated leave applications. So, if you’d like employees to be able to apply for past-dated leaves but limit the length up to 7 days, or 30 days or 90 days, it’s all up to you!

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Unpaid Leaves Report:
Though there were ways to keep track of unpaid leaves every month, using a combination of different reports, some customers felt the need for having a specific/dedicated report only for Unpaid leaves. So, we have now added an extra report in the Leaves category which will list only the Unpaid Leaves data for you.

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Streams – Enterprise Social Networking

Private Messaging (Inbox) in Streams:
This is one of my favourite features. It’s like a private little inbox within Streams for you to have confidential conversations off the public network in your company. It’s ideal for having discussions between managers, or heads of different teams/depts, etc. What’s more, you can schedule events, run polls, etc within it too!

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Option for Admin to Edit Messages in Streams
This one is for those of you who wish to have more power at hand, “just in case” you may need it! Now as an Administrator you can edit or delete any message in the entire company network (Streams), irrespective of who has posted it or which group it is in. Not just that, if you’re an employee with limited permissions, you can edit your own messages too.

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Other Miscellaneous Enhancements

New All-in-One Requests Management Page:
I’m sure you’re going to love this! This one goes out to all of those Admins and Managers who have tens/hundreds of requests to look into every month. We’ve revamped our Requests Management page and given you a page full of options to filter Requests by their Status (Pending/Processed), Type (Attendance/Leaves/Reimbursements, etc), By who, and more.

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Email Reminder for Pending Requests:
This one is especially for those procrastinators who don’t act on Attendance, Leaves or Reimbursement requests on time. It’s an automatic email reminder which can be enabled by the Admin, such that anyone with even 1 pending request of any kind, will get an email in the morning reminding them to look into it.

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Automatic Access for Managers to View their Reportees’ Attendance/Leaves:
There was a constant request from several customers asking us to give employees with reportees, direct access to their reportees’ Attendance and Leaves pages. This request came with the reason that it will help managers keep a tab on their team’s HR activities, which seemed quite a fair request – so we’ve added an automatic permission rule, which gives any employee with reportees, access to their Attendance and Leaves pages.

What’s Coming Up?

Well, this is the most exciting section of this post as far as I’m concerned. We’ve got some major major new updates coming up soon. Most important of these updates are:
1. A swanky new User-Interface, which will sweep you off your feet.
2. One-click payroll processing, meant to reduce all your payroll paperwork.
3. New convenient pricing plans, to make life easier to understand.
4. Online payment gateway system, for automating your payments and reducing my follow ups!

Until next time, hope you enjoy using these new features and as always, keep the feedback pouring – just like the monsoon rains here in Mumbai!

After a lot of ups and downs, work and re-work, bugs and errors, all day coding and overnight marathons, we’ve finally launched the much awaited and very useful – Run Payroll feature!

First, a little background about typical payroll processes…

If you’re not using a “payroll software”, the general payroll process works something like this:
– At the end of the month or whenever the company’s monthly payroll cycle ends, the HR team will collect attendance data.
– This data may be in the form of a physical register which employees sign every day upon entering the office, or it may be a RFID/Biometric type of device.
– After the attendance data is collected, the HR team will go through each employee’s entire month’s attendance and create a list of all dates which have any discrepancy or missing attendance logs.
– This list will then be sent to the employee seeking answers/clarifications/regularizations for the discrepancies.
– Post this, the HR team will also check their Leave Tracker sheet to confirm about approved, unapproved/pending or unpaid leaves for that month.
– After all this data is analyzed, a final attendance report will be generated which provides a summary of the number of Present days, Leaves and Unpaid/LOP days (Loss of Pay).
– Then this report will be used by the Accounts/Finance team to create a summary of all employees’ salary break up for that month, as per their salary structure.
– The Accounts team will then forward a final payroll sheet to the HR team for management confirmations (if any). This sheet will have a list of all basic details of each employee, their gross salary amount, their deductions (including Loss of Pay) and the final net amount.
– Once there’s a final go-ahead from the HR team, a bank format sheet will be prepared by the Accounts team so that the company’s bank can be officially notified of transferring the required net salary in each employee’s bank account.

This above process typically takes anywhere between 3-4 days (at minimum) to complete, because neither the HR nor the Accounts team want to have any errors or calculation mistakes in the salary figures. And I’ve not even taken into consideration the to-and-fro which could happen between the HR<>Employees<>Accounts Team, etc here. This is as smooth as it can get! If you’ve ever been a part of such a process, you’ll know very well how often and how easily things can go wrong.

You may ask, but what if the company has a “Payroll Software”. To that, I will say yes, it could be slightly easier compared to the manual process but considering the nature and standards of the payroll software available in the Indian market (from my research), I’m pretty sure things won’t be hunky-dory if you’re using one too.

What is Run Payroll?

Run Payroll is our answer to all problems which plague your company’s payroll process. It is an automated payroll processing engine which helps HR and Accounts teams to breeze through the monthly payroll process without breaking a sweat. Run Payroll guides you through a step-wise workflow of the payroll process, while simultaneously taking care of validations/verifications/data-checks, etc. on your behalf – so that you simply have to confirm what you see.

What’s the best thing about Run Payroll?

My favourite aspect of the Run Payroll feature is the “Payroll Data” check which is carried out by our system automatically, at the start of Run Payroll. Basically, while doing research on companies and their manual payroll processes, we found out that a bulk of their time and effort was wasted due to:
1) Important employee data missing/unavailable, like date of birth, joining date, whether the employee is handicap or not, is he working in a metropolitan city, etc.
2) Keeping track of tens of salary structures for hundreds of different employees, storing and managing which employee has which allowance and which deduction, etc.
3) Regularizing attendance at the end of every month, making corrections and adding leaves to bring everything in order.

These 3 things always ate up a bulk of time, almost about 2-3 full days of work for 2 full-time employees. But with Run Payroll, this time is cut down to minutes. Yes, you heard it right, minutes!

How does it work?

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Run Payroll is divided into 3 simple steps, at the end of which our system automatically dispatches salary slips and generates the bank-sheet which you can forward to your bank for processing payments.

Before you begin these steps, you simply need to make sure you have defined notice periods for employees who’re on their way out of your company soon, or deactivated those employees who’ve left already. This way our system will add them to the Full-n-Final (FnF) settlement list, automatically excluding them from the monthly payroll process.

Once you’ve ensured that’s done, you can simply come to the Run Payroll page and begin your payroll process. Here’s how the overall flow is:

Step 1: Attendance regularization

This is mostly taken care of automatically, as employees have self-service access to request updates to their missing logs or apply for pending leaves.

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Step 2: Arrears and Adjustments

This step will display the LOP days of all employees, depending on any unpaid leaves visible in their account. Of course, here you can modify this LOP number or even adjust past errors by adding arrears. What’s more, you can also add any ad-hoc transactions or payments for each employee here. Payments such as Bonus, Incentives, Overtime Pay etc.

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Step 3: Confirm Salary Details

Here you will be shown a total break up of each employee’s basic details; CTC, salary structure and each amount related to allowances/deductions/tax etc. Once you confirm the net amounts displayed here, you’re essentially confirming that all-is-well!

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Voila! Your payroll process is done! Now you can easily dispatch salary slips in one click or download the bank-sheet.

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The above steps aren’t going to require any “effort” from you or your team. Our system will display the available data to you on each of these steps and you can simply agree/confirm and move ahead. Of course, you do have to glance through all the information like attendance info and arrear details etc., so that you’re sure we’ve displayed the correct info as per your requirements.

All of the above steps combined, it wouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes if everything is in order. Can you beat that? I bet no other payroll product can.

How will Run Payroll feature save you time, effort and month-end headaches?

For me, this is the most exciting question to answer. Here’s how Run Payroll feature will save you time, effort and month-end headaches:
1) No more attendance data collection – Since your attendance data is already monitored online (using our clock-in/out features) or synced via your office biometric/RFID devices, there’s no time required to collect data, organize it, verify it etc.
2) No more attendance regularization – Using their self-service options, employees would request attendance updates or leaves and subsequently have those requests approved by their managers.
3) No more manual verification of employee data – Our system will automatically check for all required/critical payroll data and not proceed before it’s in place, thereby reducing chances of errors to practically zero.
4) No more back-n-forth between spreadsheets – All your payroll related information is nicely laid out in front of you, to give you a birds eye view of your company’s payroll process.

Want to “Run Payroll”? Give us a shot if you’re not logged in already, I’m sure you’ll be impressed with what you see

Ever since we launched sumHR back in 2012, we’ve always heard praise from our users about how our interface is much simpler and easier than any other HR software they’ve used before. We valued this quality of our product a lot and strived hard to keep it that way. However, as our product is growing bigger and more comprehensive, it has been difficult to maintain the simplicity in the existing design layouts.

So, two months ago we decided to start working on a completely new look, new layout, new navigation and a radical new experience for our customers. Everyone here at sumHR is very excited about this new project and we’re hoping that you love this new avatar too.

Some key focus areas while creating the new UI:

1. A layout which allows future scalability, because gradually sumHR will have more and more modules like HR Letters, Performance Appraisals, Recruitment etc.

2. Reduction of the number of clicks required to complete an action.

3. Enhancing the overall visual appeal of the product, make a pleasing look-and-feel.

4. Most importantly, bring considerable improvements to the product performance levels such as loading time, data displaying speed, etc.

Here are a few mock screenshots to give you a “sneak preview” into sumHR’s new look:

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For several weeks some of our high volume customers have been pushing us to enable approval and rejection of leave or attendance requests via email itself. Earlier, our Human Resources Management product was designed on the on-product usage model like any other online platform (like Facebook, Twitter etc.) which notifies the user about an event via email and prompts them to ‘log into the product’ to take appropriate action about it.

However, in today’s rush hour traffic habits and “on-the-go” lives, a lot of managers and supervisors don’t have the time or patience to log into their online accounts (HR Management Software account) in order to review and approve/decline a leave application. Well, I didn’t think the same till I personally felt the need for it too. So, we sat down and built it for today’s ever-busy managers and supervisors.

I’m very happy to introduce – Email Actions on sumHR!

Now on, every time an employee requests for an update in his attendance logs or a leave request, you will get all the necessary details within your email itself. What’s more, managers/supervisors can approve or decline this request right from your email itself – yes, you heard me right, no more opening a new tab, going to the request page and then taking action on it!

A lot of our team members are already hooked onto this new feature, so I’m hoping you will love it too.

Here’s a snapshot of what our new and improved request emails look like:

Attendance Update Request Email

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Leave Request Email

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As 2014 draws to a close, you may be making plans on how to end it but whatever your party plans, we’ve decided to end it with a BANG!

We’ve been in hibernation (on the blog) since 2 months – but – that doesn’t mean we weren’t at it. Here’s a consolidated product update for all you, I’m sure it will make your New Year “Happier”.

(this is going to be a long list, so brace yourselves)

MORE POWER TO PAYROLL (6 new features)

Couple of months ago, we released some major payroll features including our revolutionary Run Payroll process. In keeping with our aim to completely change the way you look at “Payroll Software”, here’s a new set of features which have just gone live.
1. Bulk Payroll Assignments – we’ve launched a dedicated page for viewing/editing a consolidated summary of all payroll assignments/details for each employee in your company, this info includes, the CTC amount, Salary Structures assigned, Bank details, PAN number, PF, ESIC, etc.
2. Upgraded Salary Slips – Add Office Location and Bank Details of the Employees in their salary slips.
3. Consolidated Annual Salary Slip (YTD Salary Slip) – Employees/you can download this Annual Salary slip, which will have the entire year’s salary information in a consolidated fashion.
4. Labour Welfare Fund – We’ve also added an option for you to include deduction for the LWF in each employee’s salary.
5. Bulk Upload Extra Payments – Upload multiple extra payments for different employees, all at one-go!
6. Employee Master Report – Comprehensive data filled Employee Master Report with payroll information included.

BETTER ATTENDANCE MONITORING (8 new features)

Attendance has been one of our fundamental features, a module which is most heavily used by all our customers. It’s often been at the center of a bulk of our upgrades, and this time too, we’ve got a slew of new features released for time management.
1. Displaying Actual Punch Times in Requests – In order to give managers more clarity and information at their disposal, we’ve now included the “Actual” clock-in/out (punch-in/out) times of employees in their Attendance Update Requests.
2. Quick Toggles to Employee Attendance Pages – Move from one employee’s Attendance/Leaves page to another, in one click.
3. ON/OFF Switch for Reminders – We’ve also enabled a quick ON/OFF switch to send out Clock-in reminders (for late comers) and Absent reminders (for missing people).
4. Quick View for IP Restrictions – Easily see which employee has been assigned which IP networks, when you visit their attendance pages.
5. Clock-in Request via Email Actions – Receive/approve/decline “Clock-in Requests” via email too!
6. View Location of Each Day’s Attendance – On the employee’s attendance logs page, you’ll now also be able to see each day’s location, whether he/she clocked attendance from office, out-duty or home.
7. View Attendance Assignments for Each Day’s Attendance – View the exact attendance assignments like Shifts/Policies/WeeklyOff of the employee had for each particular day.
8. One-Click Regularization – a magic button to regularize the employee’s missing attendance data, as per standard shift assigned – all in one click.

IMPROVED LEAVE TRACKING (2 new features)

We’ve added some useful features in the leave features as well – especially useful with the “year end” HR policies like Leave Encashment.
1. Leave Encashment Policy Rules – Automatically save the remaining/pending leave balances of employees eligible for leave encashment, and store it in the reports for your ready reference.
2. Leave Encashment Report – View/download the leave encashment reports from the Reports section as well.

BRAND NEW DESKTOP APPLICATION (Biometric/RFID integration) (5 new features)

We’ve launched a brand new desktop application, much simpler, easier and prettier than ever before. What’s more, it comes power packed with one-click installation and setup too! Features of the new biometric app are below:
1. New Design – the new app has been designed keeping high focus on user-friendliness and automation as top priority.
2. One-click installation – the new biometric app can be installed in one-click, no hassles of patching, copy-pasting etc.
3. Auto-Sync and Custom-Sync – Our sync app will remain in your system tray, running in the background, syncing attendance logs from your biometric/RFID device in real-time basis.
4. Auto-Reconnect – app will auto-reconnect every few minutes checking for the internet to come back online (if it’s offline), and continue syncing from where it left.
5. Overnight Shift Tracking – We’re ready to handle all overnight shifts you may have!

MUCH NEEDED BOOST FOR REIMBURSEMENTS (1 new feature)

To be honest with you, reimbursements have been a slightly neglected module so far. But in the coming weeks we’re going to revamp the entire Reimbursements Module, step by step. Starting with…
1. Reimbursement Reports – walk into your Reports section and you’ll be able to now download 4 different types of reimbursement reports. (a) Pending Reimbursements (b) Approved Reimbursements (c) Compensated Reimbursements and (d) Rejected Reimbursements.

EVEN ‘COOLER’ STREAMS (3 new features)

1. Last modified message on top – as soon as any message in streams is updated (edit, like, reply, tag, etc.), it will get priority and appear on top of your streams time-line, just like it works on facebook.
2. Option to select year for Events – Now you also get the option to select the year, when defining the date while scheduling an event in streams.
3. Archive/Unarchive Groups – As the owner of a group, or the Admin, you can archive any group and it’ll seize to exist in active mode for any of it’s members.

EASIER PAYMENTS AND EMPLOYER BRANDING (3 new features)

Few other things which may be noticeable are:
1. Payment Gateway integrations – For the Indian customers, we’ve set up the Payu Money payment gateway system, perhaps the most fastest growing and reliable payments partner in India. And for the International customers, we’ve set up the SaaSy system from FastSpring.com.
2. System Email branding – Every email that goes out to your employees, will now show your COMPANY NAME as “From” and “Signature”.
3. Daily Digest Email – On popular demand, we’ve also launched a Daily-Digest email which will give each employee a summary of important things related to him/her, like Pending Requests, Colleagues on Leave, Birthdays this week, Anniversaries this week, etc.

Phew! Yes, this was a long list. If you’ve managed to reach this section of the post already, thank you so much for reading through it all, we love you too!

For us, 2015 is going to be a year of reckoning, a year filled with new challenges and some very exciting opportunities. And for you, we’ve lined up some big, major, crazy upgrades – Swanky new User-Interface (coming next), Performance Review/Appraisal System (coming up), Recruitment Management (coming soon) and much more!

Stay tuned and fasten your seat belts! From all of us here @ sumHR, wish you a rocking new year ahead – Happy New Year!

Happy new year, once again. Hope you had a blast bringing in 2015, we sure did! I’m back to surprise you with a new set of features which just went live.

3 NEW MAJOR PAYROLL FEATURES

1. Loans and Advances- This was a much awaited feature for us, especially since some of you have been demanding it for long. You can walk over to any employee’s Payroll Profile page and under the Loans & Advances section, manage all tasks related to the employee’s loans or advances.

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2. New Payroll Dashboard page – In keeping with our goal to ease your payroll worries, we’ve taken the first step by providing you with a simple, clean and informative “Dashboard” for payroll data. This new page will give you a quick overview of previous month’s payroll status, and upcoming payroll info.

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3. New Pay Package page – The pay package page was a dull and drab one earlier, I personally wasn’t very satisfied with it either. We’ve spruced it up with a bit of colour, a better layout, and changed the way each CTC change is recorded/displayed to you and the employee now.

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NEW COMP-OFF REPORTS & ANNUAL LEAVE TRACKER

1. Compensatory Off – Earlier we used to show only the comp-off balance report, clubbed into one of the other leave summary reports. However, now you get dedicated reports for keeping track of compensatory offs in your company.

2. Annual Leave Tracker – This is a big report, it consolidates the entire years’ leave history of each employee and presents it to you in a easy fashion. It will give you 3 pieces of important information, (a) Leave credited so far, (b) Leaves available right now and (c) Leaves taken by the employee in each month this year.

NEW HOLIDAY SETTINGS

Now you can create holidays for future years as well (which you couldn’t earlier). What’s more, you can define which holidays are recurring every year (fixed dates) so that you don’t need to re-create them every year. Our system will automatically create them every new year.

Oh and btw, the New User-Interface I talked about couple of months ago is already baking in the oven. We’ll be presenting it soon too!