HR Documents and Templates
Browse, search and export every HR document, build reusable templates for offer letters and contracts, and see what a document change affects.
Everything in HR eventually becomes a document: an offer letter, a signed contract, a payroll record, a policy. These three screens are where you find them, where you build the ones you issue repeatedly, and where you see which ones are about to go stale.
When you would use this
- Somebody asks for a copy of an employee’s signed contract.
- You issue offer letters by hand each time and want one template instead.
- You need to know how many HR documents are expired or expiring in the next 90 days.
- An auditor asks for every payroll record in a date range as a single export.
HR Documents (Explorer)
To open it: Sidebar → HR → Documents → Explorer.
The screen is titled HR Documents and does what the subtitle says: browse, search and export HR documents. It opens pre-filtered to the three HR document types you look for most - employment contract, payroll record and policy document - and you can widen or narrow from there.
To find a document:
- Go to HR → Documents → Explorer.
- Type into the search box, or filter by document type, employee or date.
- Click a result to open the document.
- Use the export control to download the current result set rather than one file at a time.
When nothing matches, the screen says it could not find any documents matching your search rather than showing an empty table.
HR Templates
To open it: Sidebar → HR → Documents → Templates.
HR Templates is the library of documents you issue repeatedly. Four tiles sit at the top: Total Templates, Active Templates, Company-wide and Document Types.
To create one:
- Go to HR → Documents → Templates.
- Press Create HR Template (or New Template).
- Pick the document type. The HR types are Offer Letter, Employment Contract, Employee Handbook, Policy Document, I-9 / W-4 Form, Performance Review, Training Certificate, Benefits Document, Payroll Record, Compliance Report and Teacher Timesheet.
- Design the body and save.
If you have no templates yet, the screen offers Suggested HR Templates so you can start from a common one instead of a blank page.
To use or change a template:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Use Template | Generates a document from the template |
| Edit Template | Opens the template body for editing |
| Duplicate | Makes an independent copy to change freely |
| Delete template | Removes it; a template nothing has been generated from says so before you confirm |
Set a template Inactive instead of deleting it when you want to stop new documents from using it but keep everything already generated.
Document Impact
To open it: Sidebar → HR → People → Document Impact.
HR document impact answers the question the explorer cannot: not “where is this document” but “which of our documents are about to stop being valid”. It groups every HR document two ways:
- Documents by lifecycle - every HR document grouped by its lifecycle state, including Expired.
- Documents by expiry window - how many fall due inside each upcoming window.
Both charts drill down to the documents behind the bar, and the page carries The report behind this page so a number you quote has a named source.
What it affects
- Changing a template changes future documents only. Documents already generated keep the body they were generated with, which is what makes a signed contract defensible.
- A document’s lifecycle state and expiry date drive its row in Document Impact and feed the Documents tile on the HR Overview.
- Deactivating a template removes it from Use Template and from the suggested list, and leaves it in Total Templates history.
- Documents attached to an employee also appear in that person’s own portal under My Documents.
When it goes wrong
“Unable to load templates.” The template list read failed. Press retry. An empty list after a failure is not proof you have no templates - the screen distinguishes No HR templates yet (genuinely none) from the load error.
“No templates found” after searching. That is the search filter, not an empty library. Clear the search box and the type filter.
A template will not delete. Deleting is blocked or warned where documents were generated from it. Set it Inactive instead; that stops new use without touching history.
Document Impact shows fewer documents than the Explorer. Document Impact groups documents that carry a lifecycle state and an expiry date. A document with neither is in the Explorer and correctly absent from the expiry chart.
An expired document you already replaced is still counted. Replacing a document does not retire the old one automatically. Open the old record and set its lifecycle state so the count reflects reality.
Next step
- Forms and the employee handbook - the forms employees fill in and the handbook you publish.
- Certification tracking - licenses and credentials, which expire on their own schedule.
- Employee onboarding - where most HR documents are first collected.