Your first month as an administrator

What this achieves

Somebody has handed you a Humavera workspace and you have to make it usable. This guide sets out the order to work in, why that order saves rework, and which parts of it are safe to leave until later.

Before anything else

Getting Started covers the six steps that take an empty workspace to a working one. This guide is the month around those steps: the decisions to make before you start, the order to work in, and the parts nobody needs in week one.

The principle underneath all of it is that Humavera reads downwards. Structure holds people, people hold pay, and pay holds everything that depends on being paid. Working against that order means redoing work rather than doing it.

1. Decide what an employee record holds — before you load anyone

The employee record is what payroll, leave, learning, and performance all read from. Which sections it carries is a decision to make while the directory is empty, because applying an employee data template replaces your configuration rather than merging with it.

This is the single most expensive thing on the list to change late. Read Setup Considerations: employee data first, then set your employee field groups.

2. Record your legal entities

Every employment relationship attaches to a registered company, and the entity is what decides currency and statutory treatment. Get the entities right before anything hangs off them — see Setup Considerations: legal entity structure and then Set up your legal entities.

Changing an entity later is not a settings change. It moves people between employers.

3. Build the structure

Business units, departments, and locations come next, because employees are assigned to them. Build your organization covers the first pass, and Setup Considerations: organisational hierarchy covers how deep to go before the chart becomes something nobody maintains.

Job architecture — grades, job families, job profiles, and positions — sits alongside this. It can be built after people are loaded, but every day it is missing is a day of records with no grade to compare against. Setup Considerations: job architecture is worth reading before you commit to a shape.

4. Load your people

With the record shape and the structure decided, load the directory. A handful of people can be created one at a time; a real company is a bulk import, and existing systems can be brought across with an import from a file.

Loading people before step 1 is what produces an afternoon of editing hundreds of records.

5. Decide access before you invite anyone

Roles decide what each colleague can reach, and it is much easier to settle that before people are in the workspace than to take access away afterwards. Read Setup Considerations: roles and permissions, create any custom role you need, set your security policy, and only then invite your team.

Where your company signs in through its own identity provider, plan that now rather than after everyone has a password: Setup Considerations: single sign-on planning.

6. Configure payroll, then run it once

Payroll needs entities, departments, and employees already in place, which is why it comes here. Configure payroll covers the path; the decisions behind it are in Setup Considerations: pay groups, Setup Considerations: statutory profiles, and Setup Considerations: pay elements.

Run one cycle end to end before you rely on it — see The monthly payroll cycle. A run needs a second administrator to approve it, so make sure two people have the access before pay day rather than on it.

7. Add leave, and attendance where you need it

Leave affects what people are paid, which is why it follows payroll rather than preceding it. Set your holiday calendar, your leave types and policies, and then initialize balances — people cannot request leave against a balance that does not exist.

If you pay by hours worked rather than a fixed salary, Time & Attendance belongs here too, and Setup Considerations: attendance and pay is the page that connects the two.

8. Route the approvals

Approval routes reference managers, departments, and roles, so they are built once those exist. Setup Considerations: approval chain design is the one to read before building anything, because a chain that is too long is abandoned and a chain that is too short approves nothing.

What can wait

Performance, learning, skills, career, mobility, engagement, and recruiting are all genuinely optional in month one. None of them changes anything about pay, and each is cheaper to configure once you know how your company actually works in the product. Where to go next helps you pick which one to reach for first.

Analytics needs no setup at all in the ordinary sense — it reads what the other sections have recorded, so it becomes useful as they fill up rather than before.

What happens next

Once payroll has run once and leave is live, the workspace is doing the work it was bought for. From there, add one module at a time rather than several, and read its Setup Considerations page before its task pages — that is where the decisions you cannot cheaply undo are set out.