Employee directory
Profiles, teams, reporting lines and start dates, with a clean archive path for people who leave.
02 — Starter website
HRM starter
An employee workspace that treats attendance and leave as everyday actions rather than paperwork, and gives managers a readable picture of the week.
Who it is for
Built for a particular kind of team.
- Growing teams running people operations across a calendar, a chat thread and a spreadsheet
- Managers who need to know who is off next Thursday without asking three people
- Businesses with location-specific holidays or part-time working patterns
The challenge
What usually goes wrong here.
Growing teams usually run people operations across a chat thread, a shared calendar and a spreadsheet of leave balances. Nothing is wrong until someone needs an answer — who is off next Thursday, how much leave is left, who has not been approved — and three sources disagree.
The hard part is not the database. It is designing approvals that take seconds, so the system stays current instead of becoming another place where the truth goes stale.
How it works
How it actually feels to use.
The directory leads with people, not records: photo or initials, role, team, and whether they are working today. Search is instant and forgiving of spelling.
Attendance is a week strip rather than a punch clock. A manager reads the whole team's week at a glance, and corrections are a click with a reason attached.
Requesting leave takes one screen and shows the remaining balance and any clash with teammates before submission. Approvals arrive where the approver already works, and a decision is a single action.
Baseline capabilities
Already built, already working.
Attendance and working patterns
Configurable working weeks, part-time patterns, holidays by location, and corrections with an audit trail.
Leave and balances
Accrual rules, carry-over, clash detection against the team calendar, and a balance that is always visible before requesting.
Approval chains
Per-team approvers with delegation for absence, so nothing sits waiting on one person's inbox.
Documents and onboarding
Checklists and document storage per employee, with expiry reminders for anything that needs renewing.
Planning reports
Headcount, absence patterns and upcoming coverage gaps — the numbers used for planning, not for surveillance.
What we adapt
The part that becomes yours.
A practical starting point, adapted to your workflow, users, integrations, and growth stage.
Your leave policy
Accrual, carry-over caps, notice periods and the working week are set to your policy rather than to a default someone else wrote.
Approval routing
Who approves what, how delegation works when they are away, and what happens when a request is left unanswered.
Location and holiday calendars
Public holidays and working patterns per office or per country, so a distributed team is not forced onto one calendar.
Payroll handoff
Payroll stays with a specialist system. We build the export or integration that feeds it, rather than rebuilding it here.
Configuration versus build
Leave policy, accrual rules, approval chains and the working week are configuration. Payroll is deliberately left to a specialist system and integrated rather than rebuilt.
Possible integrations
It has to fit what you already run.
These are the connections this starter is commonly asked for. Each one is scoped against the specific system you use — an integration is only real once we have seen the account it has to talk to.
- Payroll providers
- Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 calendars
- Slack or Teams for approvals and reminders
- Identity providers for single sign-on
- Document storage
Stack rationale
Chosen for this problem, not for the CV.
- Next.js + TypeScript
- Role-aware server rendering keeps sensitive employee data on the server and out of client bundles by default.
- PostgreSQL
- Leave balances are an accounting problem. Transactions and constraints prevent the double-approval class of bug outright.
- Auth with per-role scoping
- Managers, HR and employees see genuinely different data. Scoping belongs in one audited layer rather than in each screen.
- Scheduled jobs
- Accrual, carry-over and reminders run on a schedule with an idempotency key, so a retry never grants leave twice.
Responsive views
The same interface at three scales.
Other starter websites
- CRM starterA sales workspace that adopts the pipeline your team already sells with, instead of imposing a new vocabulary on them.
- Editorial portfolioA portfolio that reads like a printed issue, where the work is the layout rather than a grid of thumbnails.
- Travel starterA destination site that sells the trip through story and detail, then makes the enquiry the easiest thing on the page.
- ERP starterAn operations layer that replaces the spreadsheet the business actually runs on — one module at a time.
Want a HRM shaped around your business?
Bring the process you use today, including the awkward parts. That is where the useful decisions come from.