Employees are not user accounts
The single most important idea in AWRA HR is that an employee record and a user login are different things. An employee is a first-class record of a person you employ — their identity, role, pay, and history — and it exists whether or not that person ever signs in to the app. A user account is a credential that lets someone log in and do work. Most of the people an organisation employs (field staff, cleaners, drivers, casuals) never need an account, so forcing "employee = user" would be both wasteful of seats and wrong about how work actually happens.
Keeping them separate has concrete consequences that run through the whole module. You can run leave, attendance, and payroll for someone who has no login at all. One human can be an employee in your organisation and, say, a vendor contact somewhere else, without those identities colliding. And an employment change — suspending, terminating, or rehiring — never silently flips someone's access, because access is a deliberate, separate decision. When an employee is linked to a login, that link is one-to-one: a single account maps to at most one employee record.
Practically, you begin in Human Resources → Employees, which lists everyone with search, status filters, and counts. Each person carries an employee number and can be tied to a department, a position (with a grade), and a manager. Reaching for "just give them a login" as the first step is the classic beginner mistake; the right instinct is to create the employee record first and only provision access later, for the few who need it. Hold that model — record first, login maybe — and the rest of HR falls into place.
Key takeaways
- An employee record is independent of a user login; most staff never need an account.
- You can run leave, attendance, and payroll for employees with no login at all.
- Employment status changes never automatically change a linked login — access is a separate decision.
- When linked, the employee↔login relationship is one-to-one.