CharlieHR is a free online HR management application with various useful features like unlimited users, time off, sick day tracking, payroll, data storage, team management, guided onboarding, and more. It provides a perfect and intuitive platform for organizing, managing, and monitoring your employee information like holidays, contact details, sick days, etc. Unlike other HR Management software, you don’t need to download and install anything as it is a completely web-based application. You also don’t need to set up any server, as it lets you simply sign up and complete your company profile by entering details online. Once the profile setup is complete, you can go ahead and add as many team members or employees as you want.
Another useful feature of this application is that it allows every employee to keep the information updated manually. It can also reduce the burden on an administrator and save time, as the admin doesn’t have to collect the employee information first and then update them manually anymore. It also sends notifications for important matters like leaves, birthdays, key dates, and more to keep you updated. The “Guided Onboarding” feature can help the team members or new employees to sign up and onboard the team with ease.
How to Setup your CharlieHR Account:
Step 1: Visit the homepage of CharlieHR and click on the sign-up option. After that, it will ask you to setup your company by entering the company name, custom subdomain, email, password, and company logo. Once you’re done setting up the company, it will proceed and ask you to create your own CharlieHR profile by typing your first name, last name, and your role in the company.
Step 2: After that, you can go ahead and invite team members, accountant, administrator, company leader, and team leader by entering their email addresses. Now, you can choose the company size and select the attributes for which you’ll be using CharlieHR, as shown below.
Once you do that, the dashboard will open up and you can start using all the modules and features of CharlieHR.
Let’s start with various modules that CharlieHR offers:
Personal Details: This module helps you store the following information of an employee: Company Information (role, employee type, and team), Basic Information (first name, last name, date of birth, and nationality), Contact (preferred name, secondary phone number, personal email, and website), Next of Kin (kin name, phone number, and relationship), and Address.
Dates, Notes, and Documents: In this module, an employee will be able to upload documents (like passport, visa, P45, etc), add key dates (important dates like visa expiry, passport renewal, etc), and also create custom document types to add notes.
Payroll and Salary: The “Payroll” module can be used to store payroll details (like bank name, bank account details, bank sort code, national identification number, married status, and legal gender) and salary information (like current salary, effective (since) date of current salary, salary increment, effective (from) date of increment, and salary history.
Time Off and Sick Days: This module can be used by the employees to request time off for half-day, one-day or longer. The time off requests will be received by the company administrator where the admin will be able to decide and either accept or decline the time off requests. In addition to that, the employees can also use the “Time Off and Sick Days” module to mark any particular day as the sick day indicating that he/she is not feeling well and will not come to work.
MyTeam: This module allows all the team members of any specific team view information of each other like basic information, contact, company information, team information, and more.
Administration of CharlieHR: The admin module plays a vital role in managing and monitoring the employee information, team, payroll, time off allowance, etc.
- Add Team Member: The admin can invite unlimited team members to any team by simply sending them an invitation via email and by entering details like company role, team, salary amount, employee type, etc.
- Manage People: This module can be used by the administrator to create new teams, add custom time off types, set time off allowances, manage salary info of the employees, add more companies, etc.
- Teams: The admin can create new teams and invite new team members or add existing team members to the team. New team members can also be added from a spreadsheet by importing it from the PC.
- Offices: An administrator can also add new offices and invite employees to them separately.
- Time Off Settings: This module of free HRM software allows an admin to add days which can’t be taken off (restricted days), working week, public holidays (based on UK bank holidays), set the amount of time off allowed for your company, and days where everyone is on holiday (company holidays).
- Time Off Overview: An admin can use this module to create new time off types, see how many have been taken in total, and make any of the time off types deductible from the total time off allowance.
- Salaries: Here, the admin can set the default pay period, financial year start, set specific bonus type for your company, add new salary of any employee, set salary increment effective date, and see salary history of each employee.
Features of Charlie free online HR application:
Notifications: This feature sends you smart alerts for various activities withing the company and teams such as upcoming birthdays, upcoming key dates, recent activities, employees currently on leave, employees who are sick, and reminder notification for key dates (like visa expiry, passport renewal, etc).
Guided Onboarding: This is an interesting feature of CharlieHR which automatically guides you or any invited team members to sign up and onboard the company with ease. It divides the onboarding process into the following steps: Basics, Address, Contact, Payroll, Welfare, and Documents which will pop up one after another when a new employee or team member tries to join a team.
Data Storage: As per the pricing page of CharlieHR, it provides document storage for free but I couldn’t find any specific amount of storage available for documents in the free version.
The number of team members allowed: One of the best features of CharlieHR is that it lets you add as many team members as you want in the free version.
App Integrations: CharlieHR also allows you to integrate Google Calendar and Slack to manage your team effectively.
Reports: You can also use CharlireHR to generate detailed reports for the following entities:
- Basic Member Data: This can be used to export all team members’ basic details, including emails and addresses.
- All Member Data: This report will include full team members’ data including bank details and salary data.
- Time Off Overview: This report will contain the team members’ time off details, including their allowance and days approved.
- Time Off Requests: You can use this report to download a log of team members’ time off requests, including the type and notes added.
- Payroll Data: Using this, you can export all team members’ payroll data including bank details and salary info.
My Final Verdict:
If you own a small business and looking for a free and simple HR solution, then using CharlieHR is definitely the best option for you. The best part of CharlieHR is that it minimizes the headaches of an administrator by automating various tasks which the admin needs to do manually while managing employee information such as updating each employee information after collecting details, filling sick details into time off manually, and so on.
