All documentation · People operations

HR administration

Set up Clyentra's HR module: add or import employees, give them app access, build departments and designations, define shifts and holidays, run onboarding checklists and performance cycles.

9 min read · Reviewed 2026-07-13

Clyentra's HR module is a set of pages under /hr, plus one settings screen where the rules live. This guide is the map: what each page is for, what to configure first, and how an employee record becomes a person who can actually log in.

The pages

Everything configurable lives in one place: /hr/hr-configurations carries seven tabs — leave policies, holidays, shifts, onboarding, salary structures, payroll, performance. When this article says "an admin configures X", that is where. The other pages are what employees and managers see day to day.

Add employees

The directory gives you two doors: Add employee for one person, Import CSV for everyone else.

The employee form asks for Employee code, First name, Last name, Joining date, Work email, Personal email, Phone number, Work location, Employment type, Status, Department, Designation and Manager.

Sensitive fields are masked, and should stay that way: The employee record also holds bank account details, a tax ID number and a national ID number. Clyentra masks all of them by default and puts a reveal toggle on each one — an eye icon with the label Show {field}. Reveal a field only when you actively need to read it, and never on a shared screen.

Import a team in one go

Import CSV opens Bulk Import Employees. It accepts .csv, .xlsx and .xls — anything else is refused with "Only .csv, .xlsx, and .xls files are accepted."

1. Press Download Template. You get a file with the correct headers already in place. The template has 13 columns, covering everything from the employee code to the manager reference.
2. Fill in the three required columns. Only employee_code, first_name and joining_date are required. Everything else can be filled in later, one record at a time.
3. Format dates correctly. Clyentra states the rule: "Date format should be YYYY-MM-DD." This is the one convention that reliably breaks an import — a spreadsheet that helpfully reformatted your dates will fail rows you thought were fine.
4. Upload and read the result. When it finishes you get Import Complete — {n} row(s) processed. Read the breakdown before you assume the whole file landed.

Give an employee access to Clyentra

An employee record and a Clyentra user are two different things. A record exists so HR can pay and manage the person; a user can log in and check their own payslip. The Setup user account sheet connects them, and it offers two modes.

An invite carries a role and an Expiry days value, which defaults to 7. Team membership and roles are covered in manage-your-team and roles-and-permissions.

Org structure: departments and designations

/hr/hr-org-structure has two tabs — Departments and Designations — and each can be viewed as a Hierarchy or as a Table. Departments nest, so a department can have a parent and a head.

This structure is not decoration. It is what lets you announce to one department, filter a report by team, or point an approval at the right manager. Build it before you import 200 people, not after.

Shifts

In HR configurations, the Shifts tab — "Define work schedules and assign them to employees" — has two halves: Shift definitions and Assignments.

1. Define the shift. A shift needs a Shift name ("General shift"), a Shift code ("GEN"), a Start time, an End time and a Weekly off day. The Active shift toggle keeps retired shifts visible for reference — "Inactive shifts stay visible for reference only."
2. Assign it. On the Assignments half, pick the Employee, the Shift definition, an Effective from date and optionally an Effective to date. The date range is what lets you move someone onto nights for a month and back again without rewriting the shift.

Employees see the result on /hr/hr-shifts, which has a My Shift tab (including the next 7 days) and a Team Shifts tab.

Holidays

The Holidays tab — "Manage mandatory and optional holidays for the year" — takes a Holiday name and a Holiday date, and marks each one as Optional or Mandatory. Independence Day, Canada Day and Christmas Day are typically mandatory; a floating day your team can choose to take is optional.

Holidays protect leave balances: A leave policy can be set to exclude holidays, so a public holiday falling inside someone's vacation does not eat a day of their entitlement. That only works if the holiday calendar is actually filled in. See attendance-and-leave.

Onboarding templates

The Onboarding templates tab holds "Reusable onboarding and offboarding checklists". A template has a Template name ("Software Engineer Onboarding"), an optional description, and a list of Tasks.

Tasks are entered as plain text, one per line, in the format Clyentra spells out for you: "Use task|owner format, one per line." So:

• Issue laptop|IT
• Create email account|IT
• Send welcome pack|HR
• Book first-week 1:1|Manager

Build the template once and assign it to every new joiner instead of remembering the list each time.

Performance reviews

A review cycle moves through: draft → open → self review → manager review → completed. The cycle carries its own windows — Self Review Starts, Self Review Ends, Manager Review Starts, Manager Review Ends — so employees and managers each get a bounded period rather than an open-ended nag.

Employees see Goals & Key Result Areas for the cycle, each with a percentage weight, and fill in the Self Evaluation Form:

• Overall Self Rating (0.0 - 5.0)
• Achievements & Impact
• Challenges & Blockers
• Future Development Goals

Drafts are saved as you go — "Complete your self appraisal form. Save drafts as needed, and submit once final." — and the form tracks how many of the four sections you have completed. Before the window opens, employees see when it will: "The self review phase for this cycle begins on {date}."

Announcements

The Announcements tab publishes "company-wide or department-specific updates". Choose an audience — all departments or a single one — and pin the ones that matter so they sort to the top. Pinned posts carry a Pinned badge.

A sane setup order: Departments and designations → holidays → shifts → leave policies → employees (import them) → app access → salary structures. Each step leans on the one before it, and doing them in this order means you never have to go back and re-tag 200 records.