This guide is for users with HR permissions
A very warm welcome, and thank you for choosing Breathe.
By switching to time-saving, people-focused HR software, you’re taking a big step to building a positive, nurturing culture that puts people first and drives business success.
How will this guide help you?
This guide will equip you with everything you need to feel confident using Breathe and help you get the most out of the system. We’ll walk you through different areas of Breathe, from uploading your people’s data through to dealing with holiday requests, sickness logging, creating working patterns and more.
As the HR user, this is your go-to Breathe manual. This guide is designed to answer any system queries you might have and get you back on track.
Our Team is here to help you
Whether you’re fully set up on Breathe or are just getting started, so far you’ll have been looked after by our New Business team.
Our dedicated team is on hand to provide you with as much help as you need. They’ll be there to help you get your account fully set up and answer any questions you may have along the way.
Once you’re ready, you’ll be introduced to our support team, who’ll be there to help you with any queries going forward.
The Knowledge Base
If you do have a burning question, we recommend that you take a look at our knowledge base first. Our huge collection of articles has been put together to provide you with helpful answers to your questions, so you’re likely to find just what you’re looking for.
This can be accessed by any HR user by going to help > knowledge base from within your Breathe account. Simply type in a keyword related to your query and choose a guide from the search results.
Get in touch with us
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, our team will be more than happy to help. Simply start a conversation with them from within your account via the chat function.
Included in this guide
Working Patterns
What is a work pattern in Breathe?
Work patterns are the pre-determined days that a person is expected to work across a 1-week period. Don’t confuse this with a rota, though – a work pattern is simply used for reference so that absences are logged correctly.
If they work irregular weeks, don’t worry - we have a solution for this too. The guides below will explain how to manage this.
Why are work patterns needed?
A work pattern is needed to identify the deductions that need to be made when someone books leave or takes a period of sickness. These can be set in 15-minute increments.
In Breathe you can create as many work patterns as you’d like. For example, you’ll need separate work patterns for full and part-time staff.
Our top tips
Make sure you’ve created a work pattern that reflects the days that a person works. If they book a holiday or sickness against a day that is not in their working pattern, a deduction of 0 will be made.
You can assign working patterns in bulk from the people list. Simply select the people you’d like to assign a pattern to by ticking the box, scrolling to the bottom, choosing ‘assign working pattern’ from the dropdown list before clicking the green ‘Bulk update’ button.
If you have multiple employees who work the same pattern, you don’t need to create a separate one for each. You can assign multiple employees to one pattern.
You can schedule working patterns to start on specific dates. Please see the guide below for full details...
Holiday / Leave Allowance
What is a leave allowance on Breathe?
A leave allowance is a pre-selected amount of leave that is assigned to your people. Any amount of annual leave they take is deducted from this. It can be set to increase with length of service and allow carryover.
Why is a leave allowance needed?
An employee will need a leave allowance to be able to show how much leave they are entitled to throughout the year.
You can calculate leave allowances using our handy holiday calculator.
Once the leave allowance has been assigned, your people will be able to see exactly how much they have booked and taken. And - most importantly for them – they’ll be able to see how much holiday they have left for the year.
Our top tips
You can assign leave allowances in bulk from the people list. Select the people you wish to assign a pattern to by ticking the tick box, scrolling to the bottom, choosing ‘assign working pattern’ from the dropdown list before clicking the green ‘Bulk update’ button.
If you have multiple employees with the same allowance, you don’t need to create separate leave allowances – you can assign multiple employees to the same allowance.
Breathe does not automatically Pro rata leave based on the working pattern so you will need to create a separate allowance for any part-time workers that you have and assign this to them.
You can schedule holiday allowances to start on specific dates. Please see the guide below for full details...
Importing your people
What is the People import?
This is a way of bulk importing information for your people into Breathe and saving valuable time. We have provided you with spreadsheets that you can fill out with as little or as much information as you like, along with the mandatory fields.
Why is it needed?
If you’re adding more than one person, the import is a great tool to use. It allows you to get large amounts of information into Breathe quickly.
Along with this, you have 5 other ways of bulk updating your existing people. These are:
Update existing people
Jobs
Salary
Benefits
Additional payments
Our top tips
If you’re adding in a line manager or holiday approver, this’ll need to be their ref. number that’s listed (e.g 001), rather than their name
You can’t change any of the columns - the titles and positions must remain the same
Permissions
What are permissions on Breathe?
Permissions allow you to give (or limit) access to specific areas of the system.
There are various permissions available to you and your people within Breathe. These are:
Admin: The highest permission with overall control of the account
HR: Can see all information, except for remuneration. You can purchase 3 extra HR permissions if needed.
Finance: Can see information related to remuneration, including salary and pay. Can’t see the employee's personal information.
Line Manager: Line managers will only be able to view information relating to their direct team. This information depends on the settings applied in the menu options Configure > settings > permissions and approvals > change what line managers can see and do
A Super User in Breathe has both HR and finance permissions combined. (Regular plan and above)
On Micro and Starter plans, HR users have full access to all employee information, including salary information. They can access everything the admin can, except being able to cancel a plan, purge employee data, access to the API Key, and change the holiday year.
On Regular plans and above, HR and Finance permissions are separate, and each user will have distinct roles and responsibilities within the system. When this distinction is drawn, certain actions that could previously be done by the HR user on the smaller plans will require both HR and Finance access - what we call 'super-user' access.
As a super user, you will have access to almost everything that an Admin user has.
The only things they will not be able to do is:
Cancel an account
Add chargeable modules
Purge user data
Activate/ Deactivate 2FA
Access API Key
Change holiday year
A Super-user will also have access to the Payroll Export
There is also the functionality to assign holiday approvers to your people within Breathe. This person will receive leave requests. Use the Bulk assign feature to save time.
Why are they needed?
Permissions are needed to create a hierarchy of control within your account and limit who can see sensitive data and make changes.
Our top tips
Before an admin user leaves, make sure they transfer their admin permissions to another HR user.
You’re only able to have one admin user per account, but you can have a ‘super user’. This is simply HR and finance permissions in one.
Struggling to change someone’s status to ‘pending leaver’? They might be your account admin. To check this, scan your people list for an ‘A’ in the status and permissions column. Admin users will need to transfer their permissions to another HR user before you can make them a pending leaver.
Can’t assign a line manager? You will need to be either an admin or a super user.
Assign line managers and your people status
You may want to assign line managers to your people so they have someone to report to.
Only admin or super users (HR & Finance permissions together) can do this. This is because the line manager permissions allow for a certain amount of financial access, which HR users don’t have.
Line managers can be assigned singularly or in bulk.
To do this via a person’s profile, navigate to More> Permissions. Click the pencil icon, and you’ll see the line manager section on the right-hand side.
Please note: if the person you’d like to make a line manager isn’t showing, it means that they haven’t been given line manager permissions.
What does ‘people status’ mean?
Do you have a mix of employees, contractors and volunteers? This little tool means you can differentiate your people and categorise the different types of workers.
Once you’ve selected a people status for each of your team, this will be reflected in their Breathe profiles and any reports you create.
Our top tips
You can bulk assign people status by going to People > Our people in the Left-hand navigation bar. This is the most efficient way of updating lots of profiles in one go.
You can also do this individually. All you need to do is search for the individual that you’d like to change, either using the search function or by selecting them from the ‘People’ menu
Bulk assign
What is bulk assign?
This means you can assign certain tasks or features to a group of people at once, rather than doing it one by one.
How to bulk assign
Head over to People > Our people. Select the relevant employees using the tick-boxes. When you’re done, scroll to the bottom of the page. A bar will show saying
“x people selected” with a drop-down box next to it.
Choose from the following:
You’ll notice that you can send an email in bulk, as well as send a welcome email to your new starters.
You can also assign training/benefit/pension records, a department and a person status.
Our top tip
You can’t bulk-book leave for your employees - all leave entries need to be entered and approved individually.
Sickness
Your team can request leave directly from their profile. Once submitted, requests go straight through to their leave-approver. Once approved, a deduction will be made from their allowance.
How is sickness managed on Breathe?
There is a dedicated area to log and track your people’s sickness on Breathe. Employees can log their own sickness if they have been given permission to, or it can be logged by their line manager or an HR user.
To give your people the control to log their sickness, head to Configure > settings > permissions and approvals > change what people can see and do > directly enter their own sickness
Why is it needed?
We recognise that the approach to sickness may vary from company to company.
With that in mind, we’ve designed a sickness module that allows you to track sickness trends, view Bradford factor scores, upload documents relating to leaves of absence and more.
Our top tips
The sickness record will remain open and at a total of 0 until it has been closed. When the person has been marked as returned to work, the sickness will remain open to allow back-to-work interviews to be conducted and for you to assess whether they’re fit to return to work. Once you are satisfied, you can mark the sickness as closed. Breathe will make the calculations for you.
You can upload associated documents to a sickness record, such as doctor’s notes. These can be uploaded by the HR users or the person whom the sickness record relates. You can do this in the ‘attached documents’ section at the bottom of a sickness record.
Knowing your Breathe calendar
What is the calendar?
One of Breathe’s key features is the holiday calendar. The calendar allows you to view any absence over a 1-month period, all in one place.
The names of users with an absence in that month will be listed on the left, with their absence displayed going across. There are different colours to indicate what type of absence it is, using the key as a reference.
Why is it needed?
Whether you’re a manager or a member of the HR team, there are times when you’ll need to know when people across the business are away. The calendar gives you a handy, digestible summary of who’s out and when, giving you the freedom to plan ahead.
Our top tips
If a user isn’t showing, it’ll be because they don’t have anything booked, ie. holiday or training. Users will only show on the calendar if there is data to display.
Statutory holidays, company holidays and blackouts will only show if a user has booked something in during this time. Otherwise, it will remain in the system but won’t show on the calendar.
You’re unable to change the colours in the calendar.
Setting up your calendar sync
What is the Calendar Sync?
Calendar sync is a way to pull across holiday and other leave in Breathe to an external calendar.
How it helps
Setting up your calendar to sync with Outlook, iCal, Google calendar, etc. is a great way to view your team’s availability right from your own calendar, saving you valuable time.
You can manage these calendars centrally, or alternatively you can allow your people to choose which calendars they’d like to sync themselves.
Our top tip
It can take up to 48 hours for new entries to show on your own calendar. This is due to restrictions on Microsoft/Google with pulling the information across.
We’ve created some useful guides on how to sync with different calendars:
Company Documents
What are company documents?
These are business-related documents that you need your people to read, including policies and procedures. They may be relevant to all your people or just a select few. You can upload these to your company documents module within Breathe and store them centrally for easy access.
Why is it needed?
Just like Dropbox and Sharepoint, the company documents area gives you the ability to store and share files within your account.
You can assign specific audiences by department or division, or you can list individuals that you would like to read the document.
You can also make the document read-required. This will send an email notification to the listed people and you can set the deadline also.
Our top tips
Breathe doesn’t use a folder system, as our mission is to help you move away from filing cabinets, physical or virtual. Instead, you can create tags, e.g. “company handbook”, for your documents. You can then search your documents to find what you’re looking for.
Your team will be able to access and view company documents assigned to them to read from the tile icon on their dashboard.
If someone doesn’t get round to reading the document by the required date, you can give them a gentle reminder by clicking on the paper plane icon.
Included and Additional Add-on Modules
Within your account, you have a modules section. Here, you’ll be able to control
What’s displayed on your account and what your people can access.
Included modules
All modules displayed on the right-hand-side of the modules page are free of charge and can be switched on and off when you like.
To access this, head over to configure > settings > account > modules.
Here you can decide which modules you think will work best for your organisation
and tailor Breathe to your needs.
Additional Modules
All modules displayed on the left-hand side are our Additional chargeable modules
The additional modules page is where you can expand your Breathe plan to add more functionality.
We currently offer 4 additional modules:
These can be found under Configure > Settings > Modules > additional modules
Rota, Time and Attendance
With Rota, Time and Attendance, you can manage your people by seamlessly creating shift templates, inviting your people to new shifts, and track your team's hours using the handy TimeClock tool.
You’ve also got access to plan events and view personnel budgets in one place. You can create customisable, automatic reports, and much more:
Learn
Learn is Breathe’s online learning tool where you can look to upskill your people and manage compliance. The Learn courses cover topics such as GDPR, information security, discrimination, and more:
Expenses
With Expenses, claims and receipts can be instantly approved or rejected. You can also monitor expenses against specific projects or clients - helping you keep a close eye on budgets and project expenditures:
Recruitment
With Breathe's recruitment tool, you can take ownership of every step of the recruitment process. You're able to create and share new vacancies, assign applicants to recruiters, and lots more – all with one easy-to-use tool.
Reports
Generate insightful reports and analytics on HR related data.
As an HR user, you have access to a wide range of reporting in Breathe, including HR Reports, Employee Records and Sickness Records.
For further details, please click the link below...
Other Helpful Tools
Kudos
At Breathe, we are exceedingly proud of the product we’ve built and continue to develop. We hope you enjoy using our software as much as we do developing it.
If you want to spread some good vibes around your team, why not use the Kudos
feature and let someone know that they’ve done something great. It’s a great way to say “thanks” and put a smile on their face.
Refer a friend
With the Breathe Refer a Friend scheme, when you refer friends, family, or members of your network to Breathe, you can personally earn up to £300 for each new customer you refer, plus they’ll benefit from 15% off for 6 months of their new account.
It's our way of saying thanks to you for sharing the gift of time and convenience with others.
HR Partner Directory
We aren’t HR professionals at Breathe. Instead, we provide time-saving HR software to help streamline processes with UK small businesses.
However, should you need HR advice we have a fantastic HR partner directory. We’ve teamed up with some wonderful HR consultants who will be glad to help if you need any professional advice.
Congratulations - It's great to have you onboard 💙
All that is left to say is a big thank you for switching to Breathe and joining our paperless HR revolution.
We hope you enjoy using Breathe. Please don’t be afraid to explore what is available to you by heading over to configure > settings > modules.
And, of course, if you need a hand with anything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our friendly team.
Thank you
Team Breathe
We're here to help
Any further questions? Simply drop us a message using the messaging feature at the bottom right of your screen 💬