Small business owners often need all the help they can get when it comes to running and managing their business. Keeping track of employee data is vital, but can often be overlooked and mismanaged. HR programs are useful as they allow business owners to keep track of everything from salaries and qualifications to absence data and training programs all in one handy piece of software.
Employment:app is a nice little HR management app designed for small to medium sized businesses and at first glance looks to pack a large punch in a small package. There are lots of competitors in the HR software market, so let’s see how it holds its own. Read on for my thoughts.
Getting Started
Employment:app can be downloaded from the Mac App Store here for $34.99 and once installed you can be up and running within seconds – there’s no need to spend hours configuring it to your business.
The layout is clean and simple, but perhaps not the most professional
The layout of Employment:app is clean, simple and relatively uncluttered, which may not be important to some users but I’ve always preferred my software to have both style and substance.
Features
Despite its low price, employment:app packs a considerable punch in the features department. Among my favourite features is the ability to add specific roles and functions that exist in your company, before I had a good play around with the software I was expecting to be forced to conform with preset options such as “Sales, Marketing, Management, Procurement”, but was pleasantly surprised to see this was not the case.
Employment:app can be adapted to suit your business
Another great feature is the ability to export employee data to Excel and Numbers or to PDF, allowing you to quickly gather employee statistics or print information on specific employees to present in a meeting – whilst perhaps not vital to smaller businesses with only a handful of employees, I feel this could be extremely useful for medium sized ventures with a sizeable number of employees.
Employment:app also comes with a handy little widget that tells you at a glance which of your employees are active or absent, great if you need to see which of your employees are available for a specific task quickly. There is however no possibility of breaking down this “at a glance” widget with the reasons for absence, for example employees on vacation or those who are sick etc. I feel this could be a great addition to a future version as it provides more detail of availability within seconds.
There is no breakdown for absent employees at a glance – an annoying exclusion
Employment:app also comes with the ability to sync with iCal and iCloud, which in my opinion is one of its greatest strengths. This allows all of your employee data to be shared between your Macs allowing you to always keep on top of any HR matters from anywhere on the planet with an internet connection. The iCal sync also means that it’s possible to see who’s absent or on vacation directly on a laptop or iPhone, useful if you’re away from a computer or in a meeting.
The software also comes with drag & drop functionality, which aside from fitting well with the clean and uncluttered style of the app, also allows employee pictures and documents to be added to employee files within seconds. This also means that you won’t have to keep paper copies of CVs or qualifications taking up space in your office, a handy advantage of employment:app for startups that have limited office space.
Employment:app also allows you to search for employees based on specific skills or qualities, such as foreign languages spoken, qualifications gained, gender, driving license type and so on. This I feel would be handy if you needed someone specific to carry out a certain task. Another neat feature is the ability to create reports for absence and training for any period you choose. These reports can be created for both individual and all employees, which is a great addition. This makes compiling individual or total employee data for quarterly or end of year reports both easy and quick.
The software does have its disadvantages however. The design, whilst clean and simple, may not be professional enough for some users. The lack of an option to group employees on the home screen into separate files depending on department is also disappointing and leads to a somewhat cluttered and unorganised list of employees on the home screen. Whilst employees can be ordered according to department, I feel that the addition of employee groups (or files) would be a wise addition to a future release of the software.
Conclusions
Employment:app is a great app that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s great for its target market of small to medium size businesses, but firms on the larger side would benefit from software more specifically designed for a larger number of employees such as the professional version of BambooHR. The default view for all employees would become cluttered as number of employees increases.
However at its current price, it certainly isn’t a risky investment to buy it and try it and see if it suits your business needs. A free trial version is also available meaning even less risk in trying out Employment:app. Do you use Employment:app for your business? If so, what do you think about it and do you have any alternatives? Let us know in the comments section below.