People and HR records

One record per person.
Even the ones who left.

Documents, expiry dates, cost rates and logins. And a record of who changed what, and when.

An electrician working at a fitting: the person a personnel record is actually about

In plain terms

HR record software holds the personnel file for each person a business employs or engages: their details, their documents, the dates those documents run out, and who is allowed to see any of it. In construction it has to cope with people who are not employees at all.

People and HR records is Unibuild's personnel spine. Everyone who touches the business gets one record, whether they are on PAYE, trading through their own limited company, supplied by an agency, a guest, or a client contact with a portal login. Every other module points at that record, so a timesheet, a labour run cell and a signed certificate all lead back to the same person.

How personnel files usually work

The cabinet is locked. The key is in the top drawer of a desk.

Nobody can tell you from memory whose right to work is on file and whose is not.

Three spreadsheets

Phone numbers, trades and rates. They disagree, and one person understands the third.

None of them is right

The agency man at seven

Somebody photographed his card. It is now one of four thousand in a camera roll.

No record it was checked

HAVS assessments

Done, filed, forgotten. The renewal date lives on the form and nowhere else.

Overdue, uncounted

The leaver

Van collected, email disabled. Login still works eight months later.

Still in the dropdown

Somebody changed a rate

Or a role, or a set of permissions. There is no record of who.

An argument about memory

The site closure notice

Sent to a WhatsApp group of eleven. There are forty-three on the books.

Thirty-two did not hear

The underlying issue Nothing else can be trusted until there is one record per person Everything points at it

What the record holds

Six things a personnel file in a cabinet cannot do.

Documents that
carry their own date

Passport, driving licence, proof of address, new starter form, DBS, induction record, whatever your business actually keeps. Each one is a titled record with its files attached and an expiry date where the document has one.

A file-type icon, so a PDF and a photograph are told apart at a glance
More than one file on a single record where a document has sides
Held against the person, not in a folder somebody has to find
Which means the date is a field rather than a memory

Findable in seconds, not forty minutesLive

Six assessments
with a list each

Driving licence checks, health screenings, HAVS, DSE, skin and working at heights. A register rather than a pile of forms, each row carrying its expiry date and its own email distribution list.

A one-click reminder that writes itself to the right people
Overdue becomes a number rather than something you count by hand
Fifteen HAVS and fifteen skin assessments live on the system today
Formal training and certificates sit in their own matrix

The renewals nobody remembersLive

Agency workers
onboard themselves

Rather than the office typing him in, the worker registers on the app: his details, a PIN, his CSCS card number, the card's expiry date, and photographs of the front and the back. He cannot finish without both.

He cannot log in at all until somebody approves him
The approver sees all four photographs before deciding
Approval is stamped on the record and pushed to his phone
An agency man who becomes a regular is promoted in one action

A control, not a photo on a phoneLive

Leaving ends
the access

Deactivating somebody sets their status, stamps who did it and when, and revokes their mobile access tokens in the same operation. The app on their phone stops working there and then.

They come out of the active lists and the labour run dropdown
The record, the documents and the history all stay
Client contacts additionally lose their project assignments
Deactivating and deleting are deliberately different actions

Not just the email disabledLive

Cost rates with
an effective date

One or more hourly cost figures held against the person, each with the date it came into force. Job costing reads them, so labour is valued at the rate that applied on the day the hours were worked.

A rise in April does not change what February cost
Which is what makes a historic job margin worth quoting
Entered on the person, not in a costing spreadsheet
The same rates feed the timesheet and the job

Last year's margin stops movingLive

Who changed it,
and from where

Every insert and update on the personnel tables carries the acting user, the timestamp, the page, the IP address, the browser and the country the request came from.

Login history for web and phone in one searchable table
Successful logins, failed ones, logouts, and attempts by deactivated accounts
Each with the country it came from
So "who changed this" has an answer rather than an argument

Evidence, not recollectionLive

Ask what happens to the login when somebody leaves.

It is a fair question to put to any supplier, and the answer tells you whether their personnel record is a filing cabinet with a search box or an actual system.

Book a demo → 30 minutes. The demo runs on our own data.

Not everybody is an employee

Five kinds of person, one table underneath.

This is where generic HR software stops fitting construction. A firm running employed staff, limited-company operatives and agency labour has three different relationships to hold, and the paperwork is different for each.

Employed, on PAYE: The full record: trade skill, employee code, national insurance reference, next of kin, photograph, signature, PIN, cost rates and the whole document set.
Limited company operatives: The people who invoice you rather than being paid through the payroll. Same record, with UTR held alongside the national insurance reference, and their own list page so they are never mixed up with staff on screen.
Agency and temporary: Registered from the app by the worker himself, approved by somebody with authority before he can log in, and limited to timesheets until you decide otherwise. Promoted to a limited-company operative in one action if he becomes a regular.
Guests: People who need a login and nothing else. Their own list, their own field set, and no reason for them to appear anywhere a member of staff should.
Client contacts: Created on their own page, forced to the client type, tied to a client company and then tied to named live projects, so they can only ever see the jobs somebody deliberately ticked.

Driven off the same record

Six things that are not obviously HR.

They sit here because they all read from the person, and separating them would mean maintaining the same list of people twice.

Announcements to every active phone

A director writes it once. It is saved with the author and the timestamp and pushed to every active user on its own notification channel, then stays visible in the app. Not a group chat with eleven of your forty-three people in it.

The engineers a client is allowed to see

Staff worth showing can be flagged as visible to clients. A client logging into their portal then sees those people against their project, with role, trade, photograph and their training and e-learning records, expiry dates and certificates attached.

Client contacts tied to named jobs

A client user is tied to a client company and then to specific live projects, one at a time. There is no setting that shows them everything, so what they can see is always a list somebody deliberately built.

The record survives the person

Deactivation and deletion are separate on purpose. Deactivation keeps the record, the documents and the history for as long as your retention policy says, while ending the access. Deletion removes the personnel record. The retention decision stays yours.

Opening a record is itself controlled

Seeing somebody else's full record needs the administrator role or a specific personnel permission, and the personnel pages are individually grantable, so a supervisor can have the staff list without the HR records. Sensitive fields sit behind a further re-authentication step.

The fields are yours to shorten

Every field on the record maps to a stated operational purpose, and the field set is configurable per implementation. A business that does not need a field can have it removed rather than left empty on a form everybody learns to skip.

What setting somebody up looks like

A new starter, from nothing to working.

Ten minutes for a member of staff, and rather less for an agency worker, because he does most of it himself before he arrives.

The person is added to the right list

Name, nickname, email, phone, role, trade skill, employee code, national insurance and UTR references, CSCS card number, next of kin and a photograph. A password and a four-digit PIN are set at the same time, because the PIN is what he will actually use on his phone at the gate.

Their access is set, page by page

New staff start on a default web menu and a default app menu, which is then adjusted page by page rather than by picking a broad role and hoping. Thirty-four roles exist on the live system, which is what happens when access is granted for real jobs rather than for job titles.

Their cost rate is recorded with a date

One or more hourly cost figures, each with the date it takes effect. This is the step people skip and then regret, because it is what lets job costing value labour at the rate that applied on the day rather than at today's.

Documents go on the person

Passport, right to work evidence, proof of address, new starter form, bank details, DBS, induction record. Each is a titled record with its files and, where the document has one, an expiry date. It is worth deciding your standard set once at implementation rather than letting it grow by accident.

Recurring assessments are registered

Anything that expires and comes round again goes on the Staff HR register: the driving licence check, health screening, HAVS, DSE, skin and working at heights. Each row takes the expiry date and the people who should be told about it, and from then on it chases itself.

Bring the three spreadsheets. We will show you what one record looks like.

The migration is a data exercise rather than a mystery, and the honest answer about how long it takes depends entirely on what state those files are in.

Book a demo → Or call the office on UK hours

Questions

Asked by whoever
keeps the files.

What happens to somebody's access when they leave?+

Deactivating them sets their status, stamps who did it and when, and revokes their mobile access tokens in the same operation, so the app on their phone stops working immediately rather than at the next password change. They come out of the active lists and out of the labour run dropdown. The record, the documents and the history all stay, because deactivating and deleting are deliberately different actions. A client contact additionally loses their project assignments.

Can it cope with people who are not employees?+

That is most of the point. There are five list pages driven off one table: staff on PAYE, operatives trading through their own limited company, agency and temporary workers, guests, and client contacts with a portal login. They never get mixed up on screen and each carries the fields its relationship actually needs, so a limited-company operative holds a UTR reference and a client contact does not carry a trade skill. An agency worker who becomes a regular is promoted to the limited-company footing in one action.

How does an agency worker get set up?+

He does most of it himself. He downloads the app, registers as a temporary worker and supplies his name, email, phone, a password, a PIN, his CSCS card number, the card's expiry date and photographs of the front and the back of the card. He cannot finish the registration without both photographs. It then lands in an approval queue, showing on the web alerts page, as a badge on the agency workers tab and in the app's approvals counter. Until somebody approves him the app refuses his login outright, and approval is stamped on his record and pushed to his phone.

Does it track document expiry dates?+

Yes, in two places for two different jobs. Staff documents are titled records held against the person with their files attached and an optional expiry date, for things like a passport, a driving licence or a DBS certificate. Separately, the Staff HR register holds the six recurring assessments, driving licence checks, health screenings, HAVS, DSE, skin and working at heights, each with its expiry date and its own email distribution list plus a reminder you can send in one click. Formal training and certification, including IPAF and PASMA, sit in the training matrix rather than here.

Who can see somebody's personnel record?+

Opening another person's full record needs the administrator role or a specific personnel page permission; everybody else is redirected. The personnel pages are individually grantable, so a supervisor can be given the staff list without the HR records behind it, and sensitive fields on the list sit behind a further re-authentication step. There are thirty-four active roles on the live system, which is what access granted for real jobs rather than for job titles tends to look like.

Can we prove who changed a rate or a permission?+

Yes. Every insert and update on the personnel tables carries the acting user, the timestamp, the page the change was made from, the IP address, the browser and the country the request came from. Login history for web and mobile sits in one searchable table covering successful logins, failed attempts, logouts and attempts by deactivated accounts, each with its country. It turns "who changed this" from an argument about memory into a lookup.

What about GDPR and how long we keep records?+

The record is built to support it rather than to decide it for you. Every field maps to a stated operational purpose and the field set is configurable, so a business that does not need a field can have it removed. Access to personal data is restricted by role and by page. Every change is logged with the acting user and the time. Deactivation and deletion are separate actions, so you can retain a record for as long as your policy requires and then remove it. The lawful basis and the retention period are the employer's decisions, and we would rather say so than imply the software makes them.

The platform