breathe HR Software User Guide
- June 4, 2024
- breathe
Table of Contents
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.
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
Documents / Resources
|
breathe HR
Software
[pdf] User Guide
HR Software, HR, Software
---|---
References
- Breathe | Software That Puts People First
- Holiday Calculator | How To Calculate Holiday Entitlement | Breathe