There is a sensible order to this, and it follows from what depends on what. Employee records are the foundation. Onboarding assigns tasks to a person. Leave belongs to a person and is approved by someone. Training is assigned to people. A review belongs to an employee. Build the workflows before the records are right and you will spend your second week correcting the same name in several places.
Records first
Get your people in, with the details that everything else refers to: profiles, roles, contracts and documents. Two things are worth extra care, because they are the ones people notice.
Who approves whose requests. Work out your approval routes before you need them, not when the first leave request is sitting unapproved. Bring that information with you and check it once it is in: an approval that goes to the wrong person is visible and awkward in a way that a wrong phone number is not.
Leave figures, reconciled to a stated date. This is the single most common source of early complaints, and it is entirely about your data rather than the software. Whatever leave figures you bring across, reconcile them as at one specific date, write that date down, and tell people what it is. If someone believes they have fourteen days left and the number they are shown says twenty, you will hear about it, and the correction costs you more credibility than the original number was worth. A figure that is right as at a date everyone knows is defensible. A figure that is approximately right as at an unstated date is not.
Then the self-service portal
Once records are right, open the portal to employees. This is the step that turns the platform from something HR uses into something the company uses, and it is where the time saving actually comes from: people keeping their own details up to date is work that stops arriving in your inbox.
Then the workflows that depend on records
Leave and absence next, because it is what employees will use most often and the fastest way for the platform to feel useful rather than imposed. Time and attendance belongs in the same wave, and if a preliminary payroll is going to come out of this, both have to be right before the first pay period rather than after it — that is the deadline that actually constrains your rollout.
Onboarding and offboarding flows after that, built around your next real joiner rather than in the abstract, because a flow designed for a hypothetical hire is always missing the step that causes the actual trouble.
Mandatory training through the learning portal can run alongside this rather than waiting for it.
What setup support does and does not do for you
Guided setup is included on the Startup and SME plans, and Enterprise comes with personal onboarding. Ask early what it covers and what it expects from you, so you are not discovering the division of labour in week two.
What nobody can do on your behalf is decide your approval routes or reconcile your leave figures, because those are facts about your organisation that only you hold. Arrive with your three migration piles separated, your access rule written down and your leave figures reconciled to a date, and the three to fifteen days most Startup and SME teams take is a comfortable timeline. Arrive without them and that time is spent waiting on answers instead. A full Enterprise rollout is about three weeks.
A sensible first three weeks
- Week one — records in, approval routes checked, access rule applied, leave figures reconciled to a stated date.
- Week two — portal open to employees, leave and attendance live, managers briefed, announcement sent.
- Week three — onboarding and offboarding flows built around your next real joiner and leaver, mandatory training assigned.