Managing Human Resources

To establish a system that is integrated into the company’s management you need to start with a current list of collaborators.

Note

Do not confuse employees and users

For OpenERP, “employee” represents all of the physical people who have a work contract with the company. This includes all types of contracts: contracts with both fixed and indeterminate time periods, and also independent and freelance service contracts.

A “user” is a physical person who is given access to the company’s systems. Most employees are users but some users are not employees: external partners can have access to parts of the system.

Here are some examples of functions which depend on the accuracy of the employee list:

• the cost of a service, which depends on the employee’s working contract,
• project planning, which depends on the work pattern of the project contributors,
• the client billing rate, which probably depends on the employee’s job function,
• the chain of command, or responsibilities, which is related to the hierarchical structure of the company.

Management of staff

To define a new employee in Open ERP, use the menu Human Resources ‣ Employees.

Form describing an employee

Start by entering the employee’s name in Employee and the company that this employee works for in Company. You can then create a new user of the Open ERP system linked to this employee by filling in a new User form through the User field.

Even if the employee is not a user, it is best if you create a system access for most of your staff just so that you can control their access rights from the outset (and you can do that through this field if you need to).

Tip

Employee and User link.

If the employee has a user account on the system you always link his or her user account to the employee form.

Creating this link enables automatic completion to be done on the Employee field in the relevant forms, such as services and expense records.

Then enter the employee’s address.

This appears in the partner contact form in Open ERP. Since employees are people that have contacts with your company, it is logical that they have entries like any other partner in your database. So enter the name of the employee as a new partner Name and the address in the Contact form. Then all of the functions that apply to a partner can also be applied to an employee. This is particularly useful for tracking debits and credits in the accounts – so you can track salary payments, for example.

You can then set both an analytic journal and a linked product to this employee in the Timesheets tab. If you do it that way, then this information can be used to track services. For now, just complete the form with the following information:

• Analytic Journal : usually a Timesheet Journal,
• Product : a service product that describes how this employee would be charged out, for example as Service on Timesheet.

Contract Management

If you install the hr_contract module you can link contract details to the employee record. The configuration wizard to install this module is shown below.

configuration wizard to install hr_contract

Using Human Resources ‣ Human Resources ‣ Contracts you can create and edit new contract.

Definition of a working contract for a given employee

You can enter information about the employment contract for the employee, such as:

• Contract Reference
• Job Title
• Working Schedule
• Start Date
• End Date
• Wage Type like Monthly Gross or Monthly Net or Monthly Basic

Sign in and out

In some companies, staff have to sign in when they arrive at work and sign out again at the end of the day. If each employee has been linked to a system user, then they can sign in on Open ERP by using the menu Human Resources ‣ Attendances ‣ Sign in / Sign out.

If an employee has forgotten to sign out on leaving, the system proposes that they sign out manually and type in the time that they left when they come in again the next day. This gives you a simple way of managing forgotten sign-outs.

Find employee attendance details from their forms in Human Resources ‣ Employees.

To get the detail of attendances from an employee’s form in Open ERP you can use the three available reports:

• Print Attendance Error Report
• Print Attendances By Month

The first report highlights errors in attendance data entry. It shows you whether an employee has entered the time of entry or exit manually and the differences between the actual and expected sign out time and the time.

The second report shows the attendance data recorded.