User Guide
This section documents the product as you actually use it: which page a task lives on, what the controls on that page do, and what happens after you press them. It does not cover installing or operating the system — that is DevOps — and it does not explain the arithmetic behind a payslip, which lives in Payroll Compliance.
The guide is organised by the job you are doing rather than by module, because most people only ever touch a quarter of the application. Pick the section that matches your work.
Choose your role
| Section | Who it is for |
|---|---|
| HR Administrator | Keeps employee records, the department and position structure, timesheets, and leave and overtime decisions in order. |
| Payroll Officer | Runs pay periods, maintains statutory rates and deductions, and produces payslips and government forms. |
| Employee Self-Service | Everyone with an account: your own timesheet, leave, overtime, payslips, reimbursements, and profile. |
| Recruiter | Requisitions, job openings, applicants, interviews, and offers. |
The application's built-in roles are Employee, HR Administrator, Payroll Administrator, Warehouse Manager, Account Manager, Sales Representative and System Administrator. The four sections above cover the four most common of them. Two things worth knowing before you go looking for a section that matches your job title exactly:
- The section called "Payroll Officer" describes the surface of the built-in Payroll Administrator role.
- There is no separate recruiter role. The recruitment permissions ship as part of the HR Administrator role, so the Recruiter section describes work that the same person often does alongside everything in the HR Administrator section.
Roles are configurable, so your installation may have renamed them or built different ones. What the pages describe is tied to permissions, not to role names, and each page states which permission a given action needs.
Before you start
Signing in
Go to /login and enter your username — not your email address — and
password. Depending on how your installation is configured, a proof-of-work
challenge widget appears above the Sign in button and solves itself; when the
feature is switched off, the widget is not rendered at all.
Two things can interrupt the sign-in:
- Repeated failed attempts lock the account temporarily. The message shown on the form is the one the server sent, including how long the lock lasts.
- A temporary password sends you to the Change Password page first. Until you replace it, the rest of the application will refuse your requests, so there is nothing useful to do elsewhere.
Otherwise you land on the Dashboard, or on whichever page you were trying to reach when you were asked to sign in.
The Dashboard itself is not one page. It renders the dashboard that matches the highest-privilege permission you hold, in this order: system administration, payroll, HR, inventory, CRM, and finally the employee dashboard as the fallback everyone sees.
What you can see depends on your permissions
Every page in the application is gated on a permission, and so is nearly every button on it. Two consequences you will notice:
- The sidebar only lists what you can open. A module missing from your sidebar is not hidden or collapsed — you do not have the permission for it.
- Typing the URL of a page you lack permission for returns you to the Dashboard. There is no error page; the application behaves as though the address did not exist.
Within a page, actions you cannot perform are omitted rather than disabled. If a guide here mentions a button you cannot find, the permission is the first thing to check with whoever administers your account.
Hiding a control is a convenience, not the security boundary. The server authorises every request against your real permissions independently, so a hidden button and a rejected request protect the same thing.
Switching your active role
Some people hold more than one role — an HR Administrator who also runs payroll, for instance, and System Administrators, who qualify for every role. If that applies to you, you can narrow the interface to one role at a time instead of seeing every module at once.
- Select your avatar at the top right of the header. The menu opens with your name, email, and a badge showing your current role view.
- Under Switch Role View, choose the role you want. System Administrators also get a Full Access (All Roles) option, which is the unfiltered view.
- The application returns you to the Dashboard in the new role view.
The Switch Role View group only appears when you qualify for more than one role, so most people will not see it. Your choice is remembered between visits.
Switching roles changes what the interface offers you and nothing else. It cannot grant you an action you do not already have — it only narrows the menu down to one job at a time.
Finding your way around
The sidebar on the left groups pages by module. Two controls sit above the groups: Customize navigation, which lets you reorder groups, hide entries you never use, and pin favourites to the top; and a collapse control that shrinks the sidebar to icons. On narrow screens the sidebar becomes a menu button in the header instead.
The header carries breadcrumbs for the page you are on, a light/dark mode toggle, and the account menu described above.
For developers
If you are here to build against the system rather than use it:
- Onboarding walks through getting a local stack running.
- API Reference covers REST conventions, authentication, and the generated reference for every endpoint.
- Architecture explains how the pieces fit together.