Sage HR

If you’ve been manually handling a company’s HR operations, you would probably wonder about the benefits of implementing an HR solution. But when you take a closer look, you will see that it helps in cost savings, maximize an HR’s time to focus on business-building tasks, and provide accurate insights into every department, team, and individual to make better decisions. Besides, HR software won’t even cost the amount of money your organization may be losing in terms of lost man-hours and mistakes.

So, if you are in the market for HR software, here is one that will help you narrow down your choices –  CakeHR. CakeHR is a cloud-based HR solution designed to help companies across verticals manage their employees. From recruitment to shift scheduling and expenses, CakeHR helps you take care of everything quickly.

That being said, let’s walk you through the salient features and modules of CakeHR.

Prominent Features of CakeHR

1. Dashboard

As soon as you log into your CakeHR account, here is what you will see,

Its intuitive dashboard gives you an overview of the Tasks you are working on, any upcoming Work Anniversaries or Birthdays, your Employees, Time-offs was taken by your teammates, your Leave Balance, and more. To keep it simple, we can say that it comprises everything you want to see while you log into the system in just a fraction of a minute.

The best part about CakeHR’s dashboard is that it is completely customizable. When you click on the ‘Settings’ icon on the upper right corner of your dashboard, you will see an ‘arrow’ and ‘cross’ sign on each of your widgets on the dashboard. The arrow lets you reposition the widgets by simple drag-and-drop, whereas the cross enables you to remove the widgets from your dashboard. However, you can add or delete any of the widgets as and when needed from the settings tab. Moreover, CakeHR helps you personalize your account with different layouts, as shown below,

Again, the modules on the left side are visible based on the user access level. Thus, you see only what is important to you.

2. Calendar

The calendar gives you a brief of your employees’ time-offs, public holidays, birthdays, work anniversaries, business trips, sick days, work-from-home, vacation leaves, and more. You can differentiate between all these easily as they are highlighted in different colors. Again, hovering the mouse cursor on a specific date will give you a summary of what the leave is for and also the status of it, i.e., approved or awaiting approval.

You can opt to look at certain employees’ calendars by searching for them directly. You can even have a team-wise calendar view. Besides, you can also choose to view it as per your employees' locations, be it the USA, Canada, India, or anywhere.

The calendar lets you get insights into the past months and even the upcoming ones. If you use other calendars like Microsoft Outlook, Apple iCal, or any other, you can sync CakeHR’s calendar to it.

3. Announcements

This module is essential for HRs, managers, and team leaders. They can make company-wide announcements and share important updates, news, and events with their colleagues. The announcements can be limited either only to admins or everyone. If you enable it for everyone, the messages will be delivered to the entire workforce. You can even upload documents and images along with your message.

4. Schedule

With CakeHR, you can create and edit shifts and notify about the same to your employees. Admins can create shift templates, and managers can use these templates. However, they can even add custom shifts.

This schedule planning interface is pretty interactive. It allows you to move and copy the shifts with a simple drag-and-drop operation. Further, you can allocate dedicated shift managers and split your company into different schedule groups and areas. Thus, managing shifts is no longer a hassle. Moving ahead, CakeHR even facilitates the employees to add their availability, informing the managers when they can or cannot work.

Admins or managers can copy or clear the schedule as and when needed. They can plan the shifts for a week or month. This can also be sorted depending on the employees and their positions. Additionally, the shift schedules can be incorporated into the calendar so that employees can get a knack for it on their mobile devices, irrespective of where they are.

5. Timesheets

When it comes to calculating employees’ salaries, recording the amount of time they have worked is of utmost importance. Timesheets are a modern replacement for paper-based attendance sheets and tabular entries that HRs used to do earlier.

CakeHR offers an accurate view of an employee’s working hours. It splits this into clock-in, clock-out, breaks, and total working hours. Employees can submit their timesheets to their team leaders or managers after a certain period, i.e., every week or month.

Let’s suppose; you clock in and log out of the CakeHR portal. It will still keep on counting your working hours. If you forget to clock out, the system will automatically clock you out after a pre-decided time. Thus, you can leave the rest running in the background while focusing on crucial activities.

You can define the timesheet approval flows and assign who will be approving whose timesheets, thus, ensuring that HR doesn’t spend all his time looking after each employee’s attendance. Moreover, CakeHR also provides you with an overtime hour calculation. It compensates your overtime or converts it into time-offs, depending on company policies. Nevertheless, this is completely on your company’s policy.

If the need arises, you can run short reports of the timesheets.

6. 1-TO-1

With 1-to-1 meetings, CakeHR enables direct communication between subordinates and their direct managers. Thus, it provides a platform for direct managers and their employees to discuss goals, performance, etc.

7. OKRs/Goals

Objectives and Key Results are the new way businesses are adopting to make the most of their workforce. It helps set aspirational goals at the company, team, and individual levels. OKRs enable organizations to keep track of every employee’s progress while ensuring that they align with the company’s vision.

CakeHR lets you set goals for your employees, team, company, and yourself.

• My Employee Goals: This refers to the goals that you have set for your employees. You can view, edit, delete, and evaluate them all in one place. While setting a goal, CakeHR lets you choose if the task will be visible to the employees assigned or anyone on the team. You can even update the progress and mark the tasks as – not achieved, partly achieved, achieved, and overachieved. This helps you analyze the progress of your team members.

• Personal Goals: Here, you can view the goals you have set for yourself. Similar to the Employee Goals, you can update, edit, and delete the goals as required. CakeHR also lets you change the view of the list. One is as shown in the above picture, and the other is as shown below,

• Team Goals: Goals of the team as a whole can be set here. This marks the team's progress and helps highlight the areas of improvement. You can also link it with the parent goals, i.e., Company Goals.
• Company Goals: CakeHR facilitates you to add company goals, as well. Adding owners and collaborators to track the goal progress enables you to accomplish everything.
• All Goals: All of your individual goals will appear here.

• Quarterly Progress: Depending on the progress of your team, company, and individual goals, you can generate reports and keep track of it. Quarterly Progress gives you a visual representation of your goal progress.

8. Feedback

CakeHR lets you build custom feedback templates. You can add competencies and relevant questions and choose from feedback choices like multiple choice, star rating, or comments. It also provides you with a ready email template you can send to employees to fill out the feedback form.

Once you create a feedback form, you can edit, duplicate, and delete the same. Furthermore, you can preview, update the sending rights, and amend the invitation message if required.

You can also give and take quick feedback from your peers, as shown below,

With quick feedback, employees can seek the opinions of people they trust and give their comments to anyone in the company in just a few clicks. 

9. Surveys

Similar to Feedback, CakeHR lets you build personalized survey templates. Nevertheless, survey results stay anonymous. Your employees can take these surveys right from their mobile devices.

This helps you determine the engagement and satisfaction of your workforce.

10. Company

Moving ahead, CakeHR provides you with a complete directory of the employees in your organization, the organization chart, and a look at different teams.

• Directory: You can glance at all the employees in your company. Clicking on a specific profile helps you drill down to every minute detail of that employee.

• Organization Chart: This lets you create a tree-like structure defining the high-level executives, managers, team leaders, and interns at different levels of your organization. The chart appears below,

You can edit and reposition the level of employees depending on their performance and designations.

• Teams: You can create teams, add new members, and remove them. A simple drag-and-drop operation can do this.

11. Documents

This module of CakeHR enables you to upload and share documents with anyone across the organization. It eliminates the chances of employees misplacing or losing any crucial documents.

Thus, documents always remain accessible for any of your employees anywhere and anytime.

12. Reports

Your HR dashboard looks as below,

It gives you an overview of the annual turnover, monthly turnover, hires in the past month, breakdown of teams as per age, headcount, and more. Just like your CakeHR dashboard, the reports dashboard can also be customized.

You can have an in-depth report for different metrics and all the modules you have access to within the CakeHR portal.

13. Recruitment

The recruitment module covers every stage of the recruitment cycle, from job postings to hiring candidates. You can set profiles for different positions. Each position has a unique landing page. Applicants who apply for the job positions you announce are automatically integrated into your CakeHR portal. Thus, you can view the applicants and their profiles who have applied for your positions. Moreover, it also enables you to communicate with the candidates right from the portal.

Depending on your meetings calendar, you can arrange interviews or meetings with the shortlisted candidates and process them further in the recruiting funnel.

To get a knack for all these at a glance, you can access different reports, including Dashboard (this refers to the recruitment module), Applicants, Productivity, Positions, Hiring Velocity, Time to Fill, Friend Referrals, and Hired. This helps your HR and recruitment team acquire knowledge of the resources deployed and the time taken to hire new employees. Moreover, the complete process is streamlined to ensure you get the best talent.

Summing Up

With a plethora of modules to ease HR-related activities, CakeHR sees that it is suitable for everyone in the organization; be it HR personnel, managers, or employees. Along with handling your HR chores, it makes recruitment easy. Moreover, it eliminates manual paperwork, miscommunication in employees’ leaves, and a cumbersome process to access employee data.

If you want to explore CakeHR by Sage, you can visit its website or SoftwareSuggest Profile Page.