BrightHR vs. Vacation Tracker

Customer support from Leyla has been invaluable. When we moved from our previous payroll software provider we had a few compatibility issues. We were able to work with Leyla and the wider team to come up with solutions for us. The compatibility issues that we initially had were problematic and cost us some testing time

It is good for basic increment usage. It was less appropriate for biweekly pay periods and for when work days are technically 7.5 hours with 1 hour unpaid lunch. It got kinda whacky with the numbers then since the concept of a day varied. It was great for transparency between employer and employee in terms of knowing how much PTO one has and how it was previously used. Good for history

Incentivized

• People Overview on home page shows a snapshot of the day's activities. Great for seeing who is on leave at a glance.
• Easy to read employee hub section and ability to manage teams.
• Booking leave absence is simple and straightforward in BrightHR.
• Shows the annual leave balance in a clear visual way

Incentivized

• easy to sign up
• visually clear
• simple in purpose

Incentivized

• Notifications for requests should be optional based on individual employees. For example an admin won’t necessarily want every staff members leave requests by email and push notification. The settings only currently allow for notifications for everyone or no one. Being assigned as a manager may not allow data viewing required of wider staff.
• Toil should automatically be accrued into a balance if the employees clocked in time amounts to more than the target hours. It shouldn’t have to be calculated and requested.
• When reviewing hours worked for the week, the history calculation should take into account approved leave and sickness etc. I have a staff members target of 37 hours, but if their hours show 29 hours worked then I have to work out why they worked less. It should account for this if the absence is approved.

• more time choices or increments

Incentivized

It's not entirely my decision - we are members of a 'community' of veterinary practices who have signed up to the contract with pensinusla and have bright hr as part of that contract however, I am usually involved in the tender process as I am one of the biggest users of both bright hr and the services from peninsula

Incentivized

Onboarding took too long due to our unique working ways however the support team tried their hardest to make it work (still ongoing) In particular Leyla S. who has been our point of contact, she has ensured our issues are addressed and always follows up.

Because it did not serve us in the sense that our work day is 7.5 hours long. Otherwise, I liked how transparent it was between employer and employee. We wish it had a better way of working with 7.5 hour work days. It was easy to sign up and to introduce but ended up not being the right fit

Incentivized

The team are proactive, having an advocacy team is just amazing and a great way to really understand their product roadmap and have input into useful features or feedback

Incentivized

it was fairly easy to do but timely as i had to enter everything from scratch - i didn't at the time realise how important it was to set up the variable or fixed working pattern correctly given future changes as this is very tricky once it has been set up and i wished i had been aware that sometimes you can't make future changes without deleting the whole profile and starting again

Incentivized

We use Sage Payroll for salaries and we also use Sage 50 and 200 but only for accounting records. We looked at Sage HR but found that it was not particularly easy to use and links to payroll were not satisfactory. We were not looking for software when we took Bright HR. It was part of our contract with Peninsula and we have been very pleased with the outcome

Incentivized

We thought it was friendly and simple which it is but the issue with the time increments made it quite tricky to use. It is a lot more simplified than what we have used in the past as it really just tracks PTO and nothing else which is nice. However, the issue with our work day being 7.5 hours was not something that Vacation Tracker worked well with. If that changed then I would be much more open to looking into it again.

Incentivized

• Able to reduce one member of staff in personnel from 5 days to 3 days.
• Able to reduce time spent by payroll on holiday records significantly and improve accuracy significantly.
• Able to improve control of sick absence and improve record keeping.
• BLIP meant we did not need to buy expensive attendance software.
• Looking at possible use of payroll and other aspects of Bright HR not used at present.

Incentivized

• helped us determine our specific needs
• negative in terms of 7.5 workday
• positive in transparency and history

Incentivized