Setup support is included on every plan. These five decisions are not setup, and nobody can take them for you. Settle them before your environment is ready and the first three weeks become administration. Leave them open and they become negotiation, in public, while people are waiting to use the system.

1. Who owns the system

Name one person. Not a committee, and not “HR” as a department. Someone has to decide what a field means, whether a request is reasonable, and which exception is worth making. On the Startup and SME plans this person works with guided setup; on Enterprise they are the counterpart for personal onboarding. The common failure is leaving this implicit, because then every small question escalates and the rollout slows to the speed of your diary.

2. What data moves, and what is left behind

The instinct is to bring everything across. Resist it. A new system is the one clean opportunity you will get to leave behind data you should not still be holding.

Sort your current records into three piles: what you need in the platform to operate, what you must keep for a legal period but will never touch day to day, and what you are holding only because nobody deleted it. The first pile migrates. The second goes to a defined archive with a date on it. The third should not survive the move. If you need data moved from your current system, that migration is assessed with you before onboarding starts, so arrive at that conversation with these three piles already separated.

3. Who should be able to see what

Write down your rule before anyone is invited in: what an ordinary employee should be able to see, what a manager should be able to see about the people who report to them, and what should be visible only to whoever owns the system. Decide the rule yourself, in advance of your setup conversation, so that conversation is about applying it rather than inventing one. Access is role-based, so you are expressing a rule rather than a list of people, which is why getting the rule right matters more than getting any individual right.

The question that catches people out is the middle one. Managers usually need less than they expect and ask for more than they need, and it is much easier to widen access later than to explain why something is being taken away.

4. Retention periods, per category

Not one retention rule. Employee records, candidate data, training records and performance notes are different categories, they are kept for different lengths of time, and your obligations differ by country. Decide a period for each, write down the reasoning, and keep that note: it is what you will be asked for.

Retention in the platform is set per data category, and candidate, helpdesk, CRM and internal support data is erased or anonymised automatically once its period ends. Other categories are reported for review instead, rather than being deleted on a timer, so somebody has to make the decision when the period is up. Settle now who that is on your side. Candidate data in particular accumulates without anyone ever deciding it should.

5. What you tell people, and when

Draft the announcement now, while you still remember what is confusing. Employees will be asked to sign in and to keep their own details up to date, and multi-factor authentication is required at every sign-in. That is a small thing to explain in advance and an irritating thing to discover unexplained on a Monday morning. Lesson 4 covers what to say.

Before you move on

These five answers, written down on a single page, are the most useful document in your rollout. Every later question is either answered by them or is a genuine exception worth your attention.