Welcome to OpenHRApp — Your First Steps

By Monirul Islam · 2026-02-17 · Getting Started

OpenHRApp handles the administrative half of employing people: recording who worked when, managing time off, keeping employee records in one place, and running performance reviews. This guide is the map — what the app does, what you will see on your first day, and what to set up first if the organization is yours.

• Attendance — employees clock in and out from their phone or computer, with a selfie and location recorded at the moment of the punch.
• Leave — requests, approvals and balances, with weekends and public holidays excluded from the count automatically.
• Employee directory — one record per person, holding the details everything else reads.
• Performance reviews — a three-stage cycle from self-assessment through manager review to HR sign-off.
• Announcements — a noticeboard targeted by role.
• Reports — attendance and leave turned into monthly figures, exportable as CSV or a branded PDF.

It is free, with no paid tier and no employee limit — see subscription and upgrade options for how that works.

OpenHRApp shows different screens to different roles, so your sidebar may be shorter than a colleague's and that is not a fault.

• Employees — their own attendance and leave, their team, announcements and reviews.
• Managers — the same, plus the people they lead and requests to approve.
• HR and Admin — the whole organization, plus configuration and reports.

See roles and permissions for what each one unlocks.

1. Sign in with the work email your organization registered.
2. Check your profile. Confirm your assigned shift and who approves your leave — both are on your dashboard, and both are easier to fix now than after a month of records.
3. Clock in. Grant camera and location permission when asked; they are requested once.
4. Install the app to your home screen if you clock in from a phone.

The one thing worth doing on day one is checking your shift. Lateness is measured against it, so a wrong shift quietly produces wrong records from the start.

If you have just registered, work in this order — each step depends on the one before:

1. Departments, under Organization & Setup.
2. A shift with your real working hours and a grace period you would actually enforce.
3. Organization details — name, timezone, and a logo, which appears on exported PDFs.
4. This year's holidays, which can be pre-populated for your country.
5. Employees — and as you add each one, set their role, team, line manager and shift.

Those four per-employee fields are the ones everything else reads. Skip them and the app appears to work while behaving oddly: leave routes to HR instead of managers, employees see nobody in the directory, and nothing is ever marked late.

Locations, custom leave types and approval routing can all wait until you need them.

Most confusion comes from not knowing which setting drives which behaviour:

• Your shift decides what counts as late, and which days are working days for leave.
• Your line manager decides who approves your leave.
• Your team decides which colleagues you can see.
• Your role decides which screens you can open.
• The holiday calendar decides which days a leave request does not consume.

When something behaves unexpectedly, one of those five is usually the answer.

• Clocking in — how to clock in and out
• Taking time off — how to apply for leave
• Setting up — setting up your organization
• Adding people — managing employees
• On your phone — installing OpenHRApp

Every screen has guidance available, and the full guide list covers each feature in turn. For anything not answered there, the Contact Support section on your profile page reaches the team directly — say what you were doing and what you expected, and include the date for anything attendance-related.

• Understanding your dashboard — the screen you land on
• Roles and permissions — why your view differs from a colleague's
• Setting up your organization — the full configuration walkthrough