The employment record - Pacten Guides
Each person has one record, and it is the thing almost everything else reads. Under People → Directory, then open somebody.
THE SECTIONS
What is held, and why
Each section exists for a reason.
- Identity — who they are on the employment file.
- Contact — how to reach them.
- Address — where they live. This is what statutory registration and payroll rules read, so it is not optional detail.
- Emergency contact — who to call.
- Compliance — nationality and right to work. Evidence, not preferences.
- Record sections — the repeating lists further down the profile, such as qualifications or previous roles.
Watch out
Compliance is evidence. Right-to-work information is a legal record of what you checked, not a field to be filled in with what somebody said — treat a blank one as unchecked rather than as unknown.
YOUR OWN FIELDS
Adding what your business needs
Under Settings → Self-service.
The standard sections will not cover everything every business holds. Custom fields let you add your own, on the section they belong to, with the type of answer they take — including a fixed list of choices where a free-text answer would produce five spellings of the same thing.
1
Add the field
Name it, choose where it sits, and decide whether it is required.
2
Decide who can see it
Each field carries its own visibility — some things belong to HR alone, some are advisory, some are ordinary.
3
Decide who can edit it
Whether the person themselves may maintain it, or only HR. Letting people keep their own contact details current is less work and more accurate; letting them edit their own compliance record is neither.
Tip
A field can be retired rather than deleted. Retiring keeps the answers already given — which you may be required to hold — while removing it from anything new. Deleting a field with data in it throws away the data.
WHAT PEOPLE SEE OF THEMSELVES
Self-service
The setting that decides how much work HR does.
Self-service governs which parts of their own record a person can see and maintain. Set generously it removes a stream of small administrative requests; set narrowly it keeps everything with HR. Either is a valid choice, but it should be a choice — the default is not an opinion about your business.
How they are organised
Departments, roles, and who heads them.