HR & People.

Most schools keep their people in three places at once: a folder of paper contracts, a payroll spreadsheet, and a WhatsApp thread where leave gets approved and then forgotten. HR & People replaces all three with one platform — the staff directory, every contract, monthly payroll, leave and balances, recruitment, annual appraisals, professional training, the first-day onboarding checklist, the compliant exit when someone leaves, and the certificates that recognise service.

Everything runs in English, French, and Arabic, and reads cleanly on a phone. Money is always shown in your school's own currency. The headline numbers at the top of every page — headcount, who is on leave today, contracts expiring this month, open vacancies — update the moment the underlying record changes, so you always open onto a true picture.

The staff directory is the single source of truth for everyone who works at your school. Each person has a profile carrying their role, the department and campus they belong to, contact details, qualifications, and emergency contact. From a profile you reach their contract, their payslips, their leave, their appraisals, and their conduct timeline — open /dashboard/staff and everything about a person is one tap away, with no jumping between systems.

Every employment contract lives in YESS: the type — permanent, fixed-term, part-time, substitute, or probation — the start and end dates, the position, the working hours, and the wage, all in your school's currency. Both the staff member and an administrator mark the contract as signed — a recorded acknowledgement from each side — and /dashboard/contracts shows at a glance who still owes a signature. Once both sides have signed, the contract moves to active.

Payroll runs month by month, with a clear path from draft to processed. You open a run on /dashboard/payroll, calculate it (the run moves to a preview state), send the preview so staff can check their own payslip before payday, have it approved, and then mark it processed — at which point YESS stamps who executed the payment and when (the executed_by / executed_at audit columns). Every payslip breaks down gross pay, allowances, deductions, and net pay.

Payroll is woven into the rest of the platform rather than sitting apart from it. Unpaid leave flows through automatically as a deduction. A separate compliance view — /dashboard/payroll-compliance — lets you confirm teaching was properly logged before salaries are released.

Pay should never be a surprise. Before a run is finalised, the office can send every staff member a pre-payslip — a preview of the days worked, the hours, the allowances, the deductions, and the net that would land. Each person opens their own preview, checks the figures against what they remember, and, if something looks wrong, files a revendication — a formal claim that says “this number is off, here is why.”

The claim opens a small dispute the payroll office sees in a queue. They accept it and correct the figure, or they explain why it stands. Either way the staff member gets an answer in their own language, and the final payslip only releases once the loop is closed. The whole exchange is recorded against the run, so a question in March is still answerable in November.

Not everyone is paid on the same day. Permanent teachers might be paid on the 28th, hourly and contract staff on the 5th of the following month, support staff fortnightly. A pay group captures each of these rhythms — a name, a frequency, a pay day — and every staff member belongs to one. When you open a run, you pick the group, and only its members are computed, on its calendar.

The upcoming pay-date preview reads from the group, so the office — and the owner — can see who gets paid next and when, without holding it in their head. Adding a new rhythm is adding a group, not rewriting how payroll works.

The moments at the edges of employment are the easy ones to forget, so YESS handles them for you. When someone is hired, an onboarding checklist is created automatically — contract, documents, system access, orientation, the staff handbook, role training — so day one is never improvised. When someone's contract is terminated, the same care runs in reverse: one action opens the exit checklist and a draft final settlement.

That settlement opens as a draft with its line items laid out; a single Calculate runs the arithmetic nobody enjoys — the pro-rata of the final month, the encashment of unused leave, severance and notice pay at the rates your policy supplies, less any deductions — to a single net figure in your school's currency, ready to pay. Contracts approaching their end surface as 60, 30, and 7-day alerts so a renewal is a decision, not a scramble. And a position that re-opens every year can be marked annual, so it re-posts itself for the next intake once its deadline passes.

Staff request leave; it advances through a staged approval pipeline — HOD sign-off, then principal, then final approval — each stage gated by the leave-approval permission. Each leave type (annual, sick, personal, unpaid, plus the others your school runs) comes from a configurable catalog and carries its own rules: days per year, paid or unpaid, whether a supporting document is required, and whether the balance carries forward. Balances are tracked per person on /dashboard/leave, so everyone can see exactly how many days they have left.

When you need to hire, you post a vacancy on /dashboard/recruitment — the role, the requirements, the salary range, the deadline — and manage the whole pipeline on one board, where each application moves through the stages received, shortlisted, interview, offered, hired, or rejected.

Appraisals give every staff member a fair, documented review. You define the criteria once on /dashboard/appraisals — teaching quality, punctuality, teamwork, whatever your school values — and each appraisal moves through a clear cycle: draft, self-assessment, manager review, completed. Scores and final ratings are recorded against the staff member's profile, so growth (or concern) is visible over time rather than lost in a drawer.

Professional development is first-class, not an afterthought. You publish training programmes on /dashboard/training — pedagogy, technology, leadership, compliance, safety — with dates, providers, and capacity. Staff enrol in open programmes, and the system tracks who is enrolled, attending, completed, withdrawn, or a no-show, along with completion certificates and feedback. Teachers browse and join the programmes that are open for registration from their own portal at /teacher/development.

A new hire's first days are guided by an onboarding checklist on /dashboard/onboarding — documents collected, IT set up, orientation done, compliance signed — so nothing is forgotten and you can see at a glance how far along each new joiner is.

Recognition matters. YESS issues certificates from /dashboard/certificates — honour rolls, perfect attendance, long-service awards, diplomas — to students and staff alike. A built-in design studio lets you lay out a beautiful certificate template once (your logo, signature, seal, and wording) and then bulk-issue for a whole cohort in a single action. Each certificate carries a unique, verifiable number.

Every staff member — teaching or non-teaching — has their own portal. They view their own payslips and acknowledge each one once reviewed (/teacher/my-payslip), check their leave balances and submit a new request (/teacher/my-leave), and read their employment contract (/teacher/my-contract).

HR data is the most sensitive data a school holds, and YESS protects it at the foundation, not just in the interface. Salaries, salary-change history, bonuses, payroll disputes, and disciplinary records are locked so that only staff with the right permission — or the individual viewing their own record — can ever read them. A regular staff member cannot browse a colleague's pay or disciplinary file, and no student or parent can touch HR data at all.

A few things set this module apart from a payroll spreadsheet and a filing cabinet. Privacy by database policy — not just UI access control; every query from every device is filtered at the row level, so a salary or a disciplinary note can never leak to the wrong person. Your website is your recruiter — public vacancies and online applications run entirely through your own school site, with no third-party job board. The exit is as careful as the entry — one action runs a compliant offboarding: contract closed, access revoked, assets recovered, final pay opened. Every staff member is a first-class user — teaching or not, each sees their own payslip, leave, and contract. One currency, three languages, every device — the whole module reads cleanly in English, French, and Arabic, on a phone or a desktop, in your school's own currency.