Setup Considerations: employee data

What this achieves

The employee record is the spine of Humavera — payroll, leave, learning, and performance all read from it. Deciding which sections you collect, before you load people, saves revisiting hundreds of records later.

This is a data-protection decision, not only a configuration one

Employee records hold personal data, and some sections hold sensitive personal data. Humavera gives you the mechanisms — sections you can switch off, encryption and masking on identifiers, permission-gated reveal, confidential document marking.

What you choose to collect, who may see it, and how long you keep it are decisions with consequences for your organization as the employer. Take them to your own data-protection adviser and record the outcome here. This page describes what the controls do; it does not tell you what you are obliged to do.

Decision 1: collect what you use

The strongest default is to switch off any section you cannot name a use for. Every field you collect is data you are responsible for, and a section nobody fills in produces empty profiles rather than insight.

Humavera offers templates as starting points — a lean core, a balanced set, and one with every section enabled. Applying a template replaces your current configuration, so treat it as a starting point at setup rather than something to try later.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd starts from the balanced set and switches off the sections that do not apply to a London company of its size, rather than enabling everything and filling in a fraction.

Decision 2: what you cannot switch off

Four sections are core and cannot be disabled: personal information, contact details, employment, and organization. That is the minimum an employee record needs to function.

Beyond that, a section can also be locked by a module you have active — the interface says it is required by that module and cannot be hidden while it remains in use. Switching a section off may therefore mean switching something else off first.

Decision 3: the sensitive groups

Sections are grouped, and the groups differ in what they hold.

Option	Description
Core	Identity, contact, employment, and organizational placement.
HR management	Probation, tags and notes, and similar administrative sections.
Financial	Compensation — salary, grade, allowances, variable pay.
Professional background	Education and prior experience.
Compliance and diversity	Sections marked as self-identified and optional.
Work arrangement	How and where somebody works.
Family	Dependants and related records.

Sections carrying identifiers are marked as encrypted, and some are marked self-identified and optional — meaning the employee supplies them voluntarily rather than the company requiring them. Treat those two markers as the product telling you which data needs the most care.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd enables the financial group because it runs payroll, and treats the compliance and diversity sections as genuinely optional for the employee rather than a field to chase.

Decision 4: who can see what

Sensitive identifiers are stored encrypted and shown masked. Revealing one is a separate, permission-gated action — someone without that permission is told they do not have it rather than shown the value.

That means visibility is a role question as much as a field question. Decide which roles need reveal permission before you load real data, not after.

Decision 5: retention

An offboarded employee is not deleted. Their record and history are retained so that payroll, statutory reporting, and employment history remain answerable.

That is usually what you want, and it means retention is a policy you own rather than something the product decides for you. Agree how long you keep leaver records and who reviews them.

What is expensive to change later

Decision	Cost of changing later
Applying a different field template	High. It replaces the configuration you have.
Switching off a section already populated	High. You stop collecting and displaying data people entered.
Enabling a section after people are loaded	Medium. Every existing record has it empty until somebody fills it.
Reveal permissions	Low mechanically, significant in practice.

What happens next

Settle the configuration, then create or import your people. Sections you enabled appear on the creation form and the profile; sections you did not stay out of both. The employee record then becomes the source every other module reads.