Frequently Asked

• It makes the work of the HR department more visible and more acknowledged throughout the organisation
• It ensures your HR professionals are up to date with real-time, secure and instant access to staff information from any location
• It reduces time needed for admin and frees up time for strategic and high value HR activities because managers and employees can now help themselves using self service.
• It means no more: frustrating disparate systems and searches through paper files and spreadsheets; tedious report creation using incomplete and out-of-date data; time-consuming phone calls and emails between managers and HR staff.

The Smart HR solution becomes your central source of truth and a secure repository of vital people information for your entire organisation.

The impact on your business can be summarised in three areas:

SmartHR enables you to grow your business quickly, efficiently and with less risk.

SmartHR is guaranteed compliant with all relevant Malawian labour law requirements. The system virtually eliminates risk of non-compliance because it manages record keeping and reporting compliance for employee relations, equal opportunity, health and safety, training accreditation and more.

The system gives you the tools and information to make faster and more informed people decisions about

If you don’t have an HR system your people managers are most likely using a combination of spreadsheets, email, documents, manual forms and a payroll system unsuited to HR needs. The lack of a proper system means staff spend too much time on administration, report creation, checking for manual errors, and answering ad-hoc queries.

Your investment in SmartHR can start from as low R30 per employee per month depending on the number of employees you have and the optional modules you select. Your investment consists of software, implementation and training and a recurring annual fee. The annual fee entitles you to automatic upgrades, software maintenance and comprehensive customer support. A flexible modular pricing structure means you only pay for the components you require and the staff you manage. Depending on your budgetary preferences we provide the option of an upfront purchase of the software with a lower annual component or an annual rental price with a lower initial investment.

Because the information needs of HR are very different to the quantitative processing and reporting needs of Payroll and Financial systems. Many vendors who focus on payroll and financials simply lack the know-how and systems capability to understand HR data and the needs of HR professionals in practice. Even if these vendors have implemented hundreds of payroll and financial systems they have usually implemented only a handful of HR systems. For us at Absalom it’s the exact opposite, we’ve implemented hundreds of HR systems because we’re HR specialists and it’s all we do and because SmartHR has been our sole focus for 14 years and not an after-thought, we have the expertise and the tools to give you a far more powerful and comprehensive solution for your business.

We have a strong local development team of seasoned professionals. Between them our South African development group have more than 20 years experience in the product. To complement our local team we also have a group of more than 30 Microsoft developers based in South East Asia, whom we utilise when required. To provide our corporate customers with an additional level of security the software can be held in escrow through Escrow Europe pty ltd which means your software investment is protected under all scenarios.

Because SmartHR is a more robust, scalable and cost effective than an internally built system. Many of our clients tried to build HR databases internally and found they not only consumed significant resources for much longer than expected but came up against significant technical blocks. Building a system internally for complex solutions nearly always costs more and rarely delivers the functionality or usability you want. This is because an HR system seems simple at first but becomes more and more complex to develop as your requirements expand. SmartHR is the product of 14 years, thousands of hours and millions of dollars in research and development. You benefit from all the resources that have gone into SmartHR and avoid the cost and frustration of going down the internal development path.

There are companies using SmartHR with as few as 25 employees right up to large multi-nationals with 20,000 + employees, dozens of sites and thousands of users. The HR requirements of a business with 50 staff are quite similar to those of a large business with thousands of staff but on a larger scale in that it is a group of people you are managing. The architecture and design of SmartHR enables it to scale up or down in size and complexity. However most companies need to reach at least 50 staff before they encounter the kind of staff challenges that make an HR system feasible and necessary. The majority of our clients are in the 100 –5000 employee range i.e. small to medium enterprises.

• The security model enables access to data to be defined at a granular level
• The software architecture supports n-level organisational structures to cater to any size organisation
• We can model multiple legal entities in a consolidated group structure
• During mergers and acquisitions you can easily consolidate people data from the new entities without the need to change payrolls
• You can easily bench-mark salary information against group HR metrics
• We have automated integration capabilities (with security authorisation) to integrate with third party enterprise systems

• Yes. SmartHR will adapt and evolve to your growing needs: The database design permits virtually unlimited scalability without performance loss. The application itself provides flexibility allowing you to add and remove modules as your needs change and customize the solution via forms and fields; work-flow; automation and reporting.

SmartHR has been developed, tested and evolved over 14 years, hundreds of implementations and thousands of users so it’s a robust and proven solution. It has been designed and built for the South African environment and was designed as an HR solution from the beginning unlike many competing products

Yes. While SmartHR does offer SmartHR Payroll, the fully integrated SQL-based payroll, it can integrate with your existing payroll system. This can be a more cost-effective approach, for the following reasons:

Because you get more for your money with a payroll-independent, best-of-breed System like SmartHR. You don’t have the problems that plague combined HR/Payroll systems developed by Payroll vendors. HR systems developed on payroll platforms lead to limitations because payroll databases are designed to handle calculations, periodic transactions and fixed reporting whereas HR databases need to handle qualitative (non-numerical) data, complex processes such as approvals etc and ad-hoc (management-style) reporting. From a system design point of view, Payroll and HR are like chalk and cheese! Yet many payroll vendors branched into HR to extend their offering for marketing reasons without knowing much about HR. This is why – to this day – many of vendors struggle to deliver effective HR solutions. With SmartHR you don’t inherit these problems. This means you get more HR capability, a system that works the way HR professionals work and you have complete flexibility on which payroll you use. You’re not forced to accept a weakness in HR for the sake of the Payroll, or replace your payroll when the area you want to address is HR and when the payroll you have is perfectly adequate.

We’ve developed tailored vertical solutions for dozens of industries including: Financial Services; Mining; Construction; Manufacturing; Insurance and Re-insurance; Civil engineering; Brewing; Professional services; Retail; Airlines; Banking (retail and investment); Government; Research; Health Care; Aged care; Non-Profit; Hospitality to name a few.

Part of our commitment to client care and attention is our implementation process. We assign a project manager as your point of contact. Your project manager will give you and your team regular updates and access to our project portal containing detailed information about the progress of your project so you can see exactly where your implementation is up to at any time. Below are the seven stages of the process:

Between 2 weeks and 6 months depending on your scope the size of your organisation and the level of customisation you need. We give you accurate estimates at the beginning and more than 95% of projects have been completed within time and budget.