Permissions & Setup Wizard
Two things to know before HR and Payroll are usable day to day: the guided Setup Wizard that gets the module ready the first time, and how an admin grants someone access to it afterward.
Setup Wizard
The first time you open the HR module, a four-step wizard walks you through getting it ready. A Global Progress card tracks how much is done, and each step unlocks the next once it's completed — you can always go back and revisit an earlier step.
- Member Group Setup — define one or more member groups (see HR Settings) and set each one's work schedule, overtime policy, default pay structure, and eligible leave and benefit types. The wizard opens with one group ready to edit, and you can add more as tabs.
- Member Registration — add your employees, either one at a time with a short form, or in bulk by uploading a spreadsheet and mapping its columns to employee fields.
- Assign Members — put every employee into one of the groups from step 1. You can assign people individually from a searchable table, quick-assign everyone in a department at once, or export the employee list, fill in a column, and re-import it.
- Finalize — a checklist confirms every member group is fully configured, your compliance templates are synced, and everyone has been assigned to a group. Here you also pick your company's default retirement/severance plan type (defined-benefit, defined-contribution, both, or none — see Year-End & Severance) and an activation date, then click Activate.
Payroll has its own smaller version of the same idea: the Payroll Setup Health checklist on the Payroll Overview tab, which separately confirms compliance rules are synced, at least one pay structure exists, payroll's accounting is mapped, employees have active pay records, and a pay period is open. See Payroll Overview.
Granting access
HR and Payroll access is granted per user, not through a shared role — there's no separate "role" to create or manage. An admin opens a person's record on the User & Permission page and toggles switches for that user directly:
- HR has three switches — Self, Manager, and Admin. Each one includes everything below it: turning on Admin automatically turns on Manager and Self, and turning on Manager automatically turns on Self (the screen shows those included switches locked on, with a tooltip explaining why).
- Payroll has two switches — Read and Write. Write automatically includes Read, the same way.
- A separate Restricted tax identity switch, Export, controls who can download the more sensitive prepared filing artifacts described in Payroll Tax & Compliance.
If your company hasn't turned on the HR or Payroll module at all, those switches show up disabled for every user until the module itself is enabled for your account — no individual admin toggle can turn that on from this screen.