Leave management
A leave request meets its context
The approver sees the rest of the team’s approved leave for those dates before deciding, so the filing deadline keeps its people.
The workforce
Staffed to engagements, promoted by review.
Hours logged · August
Billable71%
Internal19%
Leave10%
A professional services workforce is fee earners staffed onto client engagements, partners and directors who own the relationships, and a business services team keeping the firm running. Utilisation drives everything, careers move through structured promotion gates, and each professional carries personal obligations, practising certificates, memberships and development hours, that the firm is nonetheless answerable for.
Where it breaks
The problems that live in this world.
Not generic HR pains: the specific ways this environment grinds people teams down, one honest description at a time.
Leave collides with client deadlines.
Approving leave without seeing the engagement team means two of the three people on a filing deadline are suddenly away the same week, and the client hears about it last.
Personal credentials, firm-level risk.
Practising certificates and professional memberships belong to individuals, but a lapse embarrasses the firm in front of a client or a regulator. Tracking them in a partner’s spreadsheet is how lapses happen.
The appraisal decides the career.
Promotion gates make reviews high-stakes, yet the evidence is scattered across engagements, inboxes and memory, and written up the night before calibration.
Joiners and leavers at client speed.
People join mid-engagement and leave mid-engagement. Client confidentiality means access must end the day employment does, not whenever IT gets the email.
Day to day
Three operational realities, handled.
Attendance, pay and compliance are where this world gets judged. Here is how each one runs on a connected record.
01
Absence seen against the team.
Leave approvals show who else on the team is already off before anyone says yes, balances are calculated automatically from policy and tenure, and approved leave updates presence everywhere it is shown, including the org chart.
02
Salaried pay, dual controlled.
Monthly runs read compensation straight from the employee record, are validated before processing, and require dual control with a full audit trail. UK payroll runs in full; elsewhere, statutory rules follow the country the work is done in.
03
Credentials and checks on countdown.
Practising certificates, professional memberships, DBS checks where roles require them and right to work all sit on the record with expiry warnings well before the date and a daily check ranked by severity.
The modules that fit
Take what fits, leave the rest.
HarmoniHRM is modular. These are the pieces that earn their keep in this world, each reading and writing the same connected record.
Leave management→
Approvals that see the rest of the team’s approved leave before a deadline week is approved empty.
Perform→
Goals tracked weekly, 360 feedback from the people someone actually worked with, and a pulse that reads the strain of busy season.
Compliance watch→
Practising certificates and memberships tracked with expiry countdowns, checked daily.
Learn→
Structured development with completion certificates, renewal reminders and manager visibility of team progress.
Onboarding & offboarding→
Access revocation queued the moment a separation starts, protecting client confidentiality.
Organo→
The real reporting structure, grade by grade, with time travel for promotion rounds.
A working day, connected
How the day actually runs.
Follow one realistic cycle through HarmoniHRM, step by step, from the first event of the day to the numbers that close it.
01
A leave request meets its context
The approver sees the rest of the team’s approved leave for those dates before deciding, so the filing deadline keeps its people.
02
Probation reviews surface themselves
End dates are tracked on the lifecycle journey and surfaced before they are due, so no one’s probation quietly lapses into permanence unreviewed.
03
360 feedback finds the right voices
Reviewers are suggested from who the person actually worked with, and the themes flow into the review rather than a folder.
04
A certificate renewal is a task, not a scare
The 90 day warning fires on a practising certificate, the renewal is completed, and the new expiry lands on the record.
05
Promotion round runs on structure
Grades, reporting lines and review outcomes sit together, and Organo shows the shape of the firm before and after the round.
06
A leaver exits cleanly
The leaver checklist raises knowledge handover, equipment return and access revocation immediately, and final pay is calculated with a full trace.
Who lives this
The people inside this playbook.
Perform
Probation reviews surface themselves
End dates are tracked on the lifecycle journey and surfaced before they are due, so no one’s probation quietly lapses into permanence unreviewed.
Compliance watch
360 feedback finds the right voices
Reviewers are suggested from who the person actually worked with, and the themes flow into the review rather than a folder.
Learn
A certificate renewal is a task, not a scare
The 90 day warning fires on a practising certificate, the renewal is completed, and the new expiry lands on the record.
Asked before buying
The questions that come up every time.
Can partners see their own teams without seeing the whole firm?
Yes. Access is role-aware throughout: engagement leads and department heads see their own people’s leave, attendance and development, while firm-wide numbers stay with the roles entitled to them. Pay data sits behind additional protection.
How does 360 feedback work across engagement teams?
Perform suggests reviewers based on who someone actually works with rather than the formal reporting line, then synthesises the themes into the review, so the picture reflects the engagements, not just the org chart.
Can we track CPD and professional certificates?
Certificates and memberships sit on the record with expiry warnings well before they expire, and structured training through Learn issues completion certificates with renewal reminders before they lapse.
What happens to system access when someone resigns mid-engagement?
The moment the separation is recorded, the offboarding journey queues access revocation for every system, raises the handover checklist and tracks equipment returns, so client confidentiality does not depend on someone remembering.
Run it on your own organisation.
Modular pricing, no long contracts. Start with the modules this world actually needs and add the rest when you are ready.