breathe HR Software User Guide

: June 4, 2024
: breathe

Table of Contents

breathe HR Software
Work patterns
Holiday/leave allowance
Importing your people
Permissions
Assign line managers and your people status
Bulk assign
Sickness
Knowing your Breathe calendar
Setting up your calendar sync
Company documents
Modules
Other helpful tools
Documents / Resources

breathe HR Software

Work patterns

What is a work pattern in Breathe?
Work patterns are the pre-determined days that a person is expected to work across a 1-week period. Don’t confuse this with a rota, though – a work pattern is simply used for reference so that absences are logged correctly. If they work irregular weeks, don’t worry – we have a solution for this too. The guides below will explain how to manage this.

Managing irregular working patterns

Working patterns

Why are work patterns needed?
A work pattern is needed to identify the deductions that need to be made when someone books leave or takes a period of sickness. These can be set in 15 minute increments.
In Breathe you can create as many work patterns as you’d like. For example, you’ll need separate work patterns for full and part time staff.

Our top tips

Make sure you’ve created a work pattern that reflects the days that a person works. If they book a holiday or sickness against a day that is not in their working pattern, a deduction of 0 will be made.
You can assign working patterns in bulk from the people list. Simply select the people you’d like to assign a pattern to by ticking the box, scrolling to the bottom, choosing ‘assign working pattern’
from the dropdown list before clicking the green ‘Bulk update’ button.
If you have multiple employees who work the same pattern, you don’t need to create a separate one for each. You can assign multiple employees to one pattern.

Holiday/leave allowance

What is a leave allowance on Breathe?
A leave allowance is a pre-selected amount of leave that is assigned to your people. Any amount of annual leave they take is deducted from this. It can be set toincrease with length of service and allow a carryover.

Why is a leave allowance needed?
An employee will need a leave allowance to be able to show how much leave they are entitled to throughout the year. You can calculate leave allowances using our
(https://www.breathehr.com/holiday-calculator) handy holiday calculator. Once the leave allowance has been assigned, your people will be able to see exactly how much they have booked and taken. And – most importantly for them – they’ll be able to see how many holidays they have left for the year.

Create a holiday allowance guide

Handy holiday calculator

Our top tips

You can assign leave allowances in bulk from the people list. Select the people you wish
to assign a pattern to by ticking the tick box, scrolling to the bottom, and choosing ‘assign working pattern’ from the dropdown list before clicking the green ‘Bulk update’ button.
If you have multiple employees with the same allowance, you don’t need to create separate leave allowances – you can assign multiple employees to same allowance.
Breathe does not automatically Pro rata leave based on the working pattern so you will need to create a separate allowance for any part time workers that you have and assign this to them.

Importing your people

What is the ‘People import’?
This is a way of bulk importing information for your people into Breathe and saving valuable time. We have provided you with a handy spreadsheet that you can fill out with as little or as much information as you like, along with the mandatory fields.

Bulk assign guide

Why is it needed?
If you’re adding more than one person, the import is a great tool to use. It allows you to get large amounts of information into Breathe quickly. Along with this, you have 5 other ways of bulk-updating your existing people. These are:

Update existing people
Jobs
Salary
Benefits
Additional payments

Importing your people guide
Adding a new person to Breathe guide

Our top tips

If you’re adding in a line manager or holiday approver, this’ll need to be their ref. number that’s listed (e.g 001), rather than their name You can’t change any of the columns the titles and positions must remain the same

Permissions

What are permissions on Breathe?
Permissions allow you to give (or limit) access to specific areas of the system. There are various permissions available to you and your people within Breathe. These are:

HR: Can see all information, with the exception of remuneration You can purchase 3 extra HR permissions if needed. Purchasing extra HR permissions guide
Finance: Can see information related to remuneration, including salary and pay. Can’t see employee personal information.
Line Manager: Line managers will only be able to view information relating to their direct team. This information depends on the settings applied. Configure > settings

permissions and approvals > change what line managers can see and do

There is also the functionality to assign holiday approvers to your people within Breathe. This person will receive leave requests. Use the Bulk assign feature to save time.

Bulk assign guide

Why are they needed?
Permissions are needed to create a hierarchy of control within your account,
and limit who is able to see sensitive data and make changes.

Our top tip

Can’t assign a line manager? You’ll need to be an HR user user and finance user (super user), which is available on the regular, pro and premium plans. Check out the below guide for instructions on how to become a super user:

Permissions guide

Assign line managers and your people status

You may want to assign line managers to your people so they have someone to report to.
Only the Breathe partner or super users (HR & Finance permissions together) can do this. This is because the line manager permissions allow for a certain amount of financial access, which HR users don’t have.
Line managers can be assigned singularly or in bulk.
To do this via a person’s profile, navigate to more > permissions. Click the pencil icon, and you’ll see the line manager section on the right-hand side.

Please note: if the person you’d like to make a line manager isn’t showing, it means that they haven’t been given line manager permissions.

What does ‘people status’ mean?
Do you have a mix of employees, contractors and volunteers? This little tool means you can differentiate your people and categorise the different types of workers.
Once you’ve selected a people status for each of your team, this will be reflected in their Breathe profiles and any reports you create.

Our top tips

You can bulk assign people status by going to ‘our people’ in the navigation bar. This is the most efficient way of updating lots of profiles in one go.
You can also do this individually. All you need to do is search for the individual that you’d like to change, either using the search function on the top right of your account or by selecting them from ‘our people’.

Bulk assign

What is bulk assign?
This means you can assign certain tasks or features to a group of people at once, rather than doing it one by one.

How to bulk assign
Head over to People > Our people. Select the relevant employees using the tick-boxes. When you’re done, scroll to the bottom of the page. A bar will show saying “x people selected” with a drop-down box next to it.

Choose from the following:

You’ll notice that you can send an email in bulk, as well as sending a welcome email to your new starters.
You can also assign training/benefit/pension records, a department and a person status.

Bulk assign guide

Our top tips

You can’t bulk-book leave for your employees – all leave entries need to

Sickness

Your team can request leave directly from their profile. Once submitted, requests go straight through to their leave-approver. Once approved, a deduction will be made from their allowance.

How is sickness managed on Breathe?
There is a dedicated area to log and track your people’s sickness on Breathe. Employees can log their own sickness if they have been given permission to, or it can be logged by their line manager or an HR user. To give your people the control to log their own sickness head to Configure > settings permissions and approvals > change what people can see and do > directly enter their own sickness.

Why is it needed?
We recognise that the approach to sickness may vary from company to company.
With that in mind, we’ve designed a sickness module that allows you to track sickness trends, view Bradford factor scores, upload documents relating to leaves of absence and more.

Sickness guide

Our top tips

The sickness record will remain open and at a total of 0 until it has been closed. When the person has been marked as returned to work, the sickness will remain open to allow back to work interviews to be conducted and for you to assess whether they’re fit to return to work. Once you are satisfied, you can mark the sickness as closed. Breathe will make the calculations for you.
You can upload associated documents to a sickness record, such as doctor’s notes. These can be uploaded by the HR users or the person who the sickness record relates to. You can do this in the ‘attached documents’ section at the bottom of a sickness record.

Knowing your Breathe calendar

What is the calendar?
One of Breathe’s key features is the holiday calendar. The calendar allows you to view any absence over a 1-month period, all in one place.
The names of users with an absence in that month will be listed on the left, with their absence displayed going across. There are different colours to indicate what type of absence it is, using the key as reference.

Why is it needed?
Whether you’re a manager or member of the HR team, there are times when you’ll need to know when people across the business are away.
The calendar gives you a handy, digestible summary of who’s out and when, giving you the freedom to plan ahead.

Our top tips

If a user isn’t showing, it’ll be because they don’t have anything booked, ie. holiday or training. Users will only show on the calendar if there is data to display.
Statutory holidays, company holidays and blackouts will only show if a user has booked something in during this time. Otherwise, it will remain in the system but won’t show on the calendar.

You’re unable to change the

Setting up your calendar sync

What is the Calendar Sync?
Calendar sync is a way to pull across holiday and other leave in Breathe to an external calendar.

How it helps
Setting up your calendar to sync with Outlook, iCal, Google calendar, etc. is a great way to view your team’s availability right from your own calendar, saving you valuable time.
You can manage these calendars centrally, or alternatively you can allow your people to choose which calendars they’d like to sync themselves.

Our top tips

It can take up to 48 hours for new entries to show on your own calendar. This is due to restrictions on Microsoft/Google with pulling

Company documents

What are company documents?
These are business-related documents that you need your people to read, including policies and procedures. They may be relevant to all your people or just a select few. You can upload these to your company documents module within Breathe and store them centrally for easy access.

Why is it needed?

Just like Dropbox and Sharepoint, the company documents area gives you the ability to store and share files within your account.
You can assign specific audiences by department or division, or you can list individuals that you would like to read the document.
You can also make the document read-required.
This will send an email notification to the listed people and you can set the deadline also.

Company documents guide

Our top tips

Breathe doesn’t use a folder system, as our mission is to help you move away from filing cabinets, physical or virtual. Instead, you can create tags, e.g. “company handbook”,
for your documents. You can then search your documents to find what you’re looking for.
Your team will be able to access and view company documents assigned to them to read from the tile icon on their dashboard.
If someone doesn’t get around to reading the document by the required date, you can give them a gentle reminder by clicking on the paper plane icon.

Modules

Within your account, you have a modules section. Here, you’ll be able to control what’s displayed on your account and what your people can access.

Free modules
All modules displayed on the left of the modules page are free of charge and can be switched on and off when you like.
To access this, head over to configure > settings account > modules. Here you can decide which modules you think will work best for your organization and tailor Breathe to your needs.

The recruitment module
There’s also the recruitment module, which is a paid tool. Your admin user will be able to turn this on if you’d like to make use of it. breathe-HR
Software-fig-6
This is found on the right of the page and has two plan sizes depending on how much recruiting you are doing. This can be switched off if you don’t have any open vacancies.
Watch the video on the recruitment tool Please note that the recruitment module is part of the initial setup. You’ll be asked if you’d like this to be included, but it’s easy to switch it off if you don’t need it. Remember you can turn it on again at a later date if you’d like to make use of it.

Modules and picklists guide

Other helpful tools

Kudos
At Breathe we are exceedingly proud of the product we’ve built and continue to develop. We hope you enjoy using our software as much as we do developing it.
If you want to spread some good vibes around your team, why not use the Kudos feature and let someone know that they’ve done something great. It’s a great way to “thanks” and put a smile on their face.

Kudos guide