BrightHR for SMEs
April 29, 2025

BrightHR for SMEs

Tracie Dunn CIPD Associate | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with BrightHR

We use Bright HR extensively to safely store all our employee information and related employee documents. We also use it for the performance mgmt tool, sending out communications, sharing documents, e-learning, rota/holiday/absence management including reporting. It is fundamental to our employee life cycle.

Pros

  • Managing holiday process end to end allowing both employees and line managers to see the holiday status of themselves and their wider team at any time.
  • Document control for sharing business/employee documents, setting viewing properties, having read/acceptance receipts and the ability to notify when documents have been updated.
  • The new performance management tool allows us to now track any objectives/goals that have been set - keeping them 'live' and accessible at any time and encouraging the employee to track and share their progress.

Cons

  • Rota Management - we have a very complex, 24 hour business across multiple sites whilst the rota's work for some teams, they don't work for all our teams.
  • Being able to future date changes would be helpful and having a 'date' system where you can travel both backwards and forward to a specific date and see the employee profile at that time so you don't have to always look in history.
  • Being able to easily transfer employees from variable to fixed contracts without having to delete and build a profile from scratch and moving from hours to days for holidays too as that option doesn't always appear.
  • Having interactive documents for instance a review document where both the employee and manager can add to it without having to download, save and then upload documents every time.
  • the absence reporting when you are using bradford factor only seems to include those on fixed contracts, it doesn't pull through variable which means i have to manually calculate these on a different spreadsheet
  • an interactive onboarding portal that we can set up and allocate tasks/inductions/documents/elearnig etc... and provides a tracking system for the employee to work through
  • We have gone completely paperless for our holiday/absence/rota mgmt - this has reduced our administrative time significantly
  • We no longer post information, therefore, there is a significant saving on postal costs and time saving as it is immediate
We use many of Bright HR's features but there are some that don't work for our business or we don't find very helpful ie. the recruitment features. Having previously used comprehensive HR platforms, I know there are areas that can be further developed to enhance the user experience, i'm looking forward to he updates!
It has been over 15 years since I used oracle but it was advanced even back then such as date tracking features etc...i think Bright HR is a good, solid product that will work well for lots of companies but it still has room for development. We have Bright HR as part of our contract with Peninsula, which I joined my business 6 years ago, it wasn't being used by the HR Manager at that time but i believe it makes us far more efficient and having a platform is now essential to our resource management.

Do you think BrightHR delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with BrightHR's feature set?

Yes

Did BrightHR live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of BrightHR go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BrightHR again?

Yes

I feel Bright HR is well suited to most small/medium sized businesses where they have a 'straight' forward resource set up. For larger businesses or for complex businesses similar to ourselves, where we operate 24 hours per day, rotational shift patterns, ambulatory staff, locums etc...we have to 'fudge' the way we use the information sometimes to make it work for us.

BrightHR Feature Ratings

6.0
Employment history
7
Organization and location management
5
4.3
Pay calculation
3
Support for external payroll vendors
3
Salary revision and increment management
7
10.0
Approval workflow
10
Balance details
10
10.0
Update personal information
10
View company policy documentation
10
Asset Management ()
Not Rated
8.0
Pre-built reports
8
Integration with other HR capabilities ()
Not Rated
5.0
Review reminders
5
Succession Planning ()
Not Rated
Onboarding ()
Not Rated
Performance and Goals ()
Not Rated
Recruiting / ATS ()
Not Rated

Using BrightHR

120 - HR, Marketing, Projects, Finance, Operations, Clinical, Pharmacy, Lab, Procurement, Administration
2 - There are two of us that are key administrators of the Bright HR platform - we have HR background and extensive resource planning knowledge that helps us to set up people properly on the system
  • document sharing
  • self service
  • authorisation of absence types
  • sharing of departmental protocols
  • praise has been fabulous for motivating and recognising staff
  • the performance mgmt tool is now being well used and for a business who historically didn't set objectives/goals, i feel this is giving people real purpose
  • recruitment
  • payroll
  • onboarding
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

Evaluating BrightHR and Competitors

  • Cloud Solutions
  • Scalability
  • Ease of Use
we go through a tender process and we would look for like for like or better platform

BrightHR Implementation

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
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation
  • not everyone has access to the desktop version so it's not always easy to check/update things
  • some staff are not very confident with using app's/technology

BrightHR Support

i don't always find it that easy to get a hold of someone
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Support cares about my success
Poor followup
Problems left unsolved
Escalation required
we didn't have that as an option with our contract
Yes - there was no resolve, it's being worked on
they have always tried to help but I did find that i found a solution quicker than the team were able to provide

Using BrightHR

ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • absence requests
  • document uploads and sharing
  • adding basic information
  • the new starter flow needs to be better - its easy to 'miss' a crucial piece and realise you haven't allocated someone the right permission or to the right team
Yes - it works okay, doesn't have all the features of the desktop version so I have to remind people of what they can / can't do on the mobile version

Comments

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