HR Hero — clock in with your face, month end runs itself

Facial recognition clock

• Employees clock in and out with their face. No cards, no fingerprints, no buddy clocking.
• Works on any device with a camera — a tablet at reception, a laptop, or a phone.
• Decides IN or OUT automatically from the employee's last clocking (an open shift means the next move is OUT), with one button to override. It does not guess from the time of day, so night shift, half days and split shifts are handled correctly.
• The enrolled face list refreshes itself, so someone enrolled this morning is recognised without restarting the tablet.
• If the internet drops, clockings are stored on the device and sent through automatically when the connection returns.
• A watchdog restarts the camera if the video stream dies.
• The same face is ignored for a short cooldown so one person cannot accidentally clock twice.
• Face recognition runs inside the browser itself. Photos are not sent anywhere — only a mathematical face signature is stored.

Face enrolment

• Face Enrolment: pick an existing employee and attach their face.
• Quick Face Enrol: bulk enrolment for a queue of people — capture, type the name, submit, next. A new name creates a starter employee record that HR completes later.

Name and email clock (mobile / tablet)

• A simple clock page where the employee types their name and email and presses Clock IN or Clock OUT.
• Ideal for quick rollouts, remote workers and sites without a kiosk.
• Records the IP address and the device or browser used, so every clocking can be verified afterwards.

Raw clock data

• Every single clocking exactly as it was recorded, searchable and filterable, with the ability to correct or delete an entry.

Import hours from a spreadsheet

• Upload an existing clock machine export (.xls or .csv), map each device Personnel ID to an HR Hero employee once, then import the Check-In / Check-Out rows straight into attendance.
• Lets you keep an existing biometric device and still run payroll in HR Hero.

• Hours calculator — worked hours per employee for any date range, straight off the clock.
• Hours adjuster — shows the hours payroll will actually pay and lets an administrator fix the punches behind them. Missed clock-ins and clock-outs are listed as exceptions to be fixed, not silently guessed at; where a punch is genuinely missing, one button inserts it at the planned time for that shift. Uses exactly the same calculation engine as the payslip, so the two can never disagree.
• Time adjustments — edit an individual clocking, with the change recorded.
• Night shift handling — shifts that run 18:00 to 06:00 are handled properly: the evening clock-in is paired with the next morning's clock-out and the whole shift is booked to the day it started. Employees can be flagged day shift or night shift, each calculated on its own rules.
• Night shift calculator — a full monthly night-shift timesheet with a 15-minute grace either side of the window, and pay codes for Normal, Overtime at 1.5, Sunday at 2x and Public Holiday at 2x.
• Roster planner — plan shifts ahead, one cell per employee per day, built from shift templates that know their start time, end time and whether they cross midnight.
• Roster reconciliation — compares the planned roster against actual clockings and reports true worked hours, surfacing every mismatch: missing punches, late starts, early finishes, unplanned shifts.
• Shift scheduler and employee shifts — create shift openings with a maximum headcount, let employees volunteer, then assign and confirm staff. Employees see available and confirmed shifts in the portal.
• Public holidays — South African public holidays are built in and applied automatically to pay rates.

• Bulk payslip run — runs the whole payroll for a period in one pass, straight from clocked hours, and saves the results as drafts. Calculates normal time, overtime, Sunday time, public holiday time, gross pay, PAYE, UIF, SDL, loans, deductions, allowances and net pay.
• Payslip pre-authorisation — draft payslips are checked and approved before anything is paid or sent out. Once approved the figures are locked, and approved payslips permanently keep the tax figures they were generated with even if the tax tables are edited later.
• Single payslip — generate or re-generate one payslip on its own.
• Print payslips — printable payslip run for a whole period, for staff paid on paper.
• Email payslips — bulk email saved payslips to employees for a period, straight from the system.
• Payslip reports — payslip history and totals per employee, per department and per period.
• Recurring additions — standing extras added to every payslip automatically with a start and end date: commission, performance bonus, allowance, travel, housing, cell phone, and any custom type.
• Loans and deductions — staff loans with interest repaid over a set number of months, the instalment deducted automatically each period and the balance tracked to zero. Loan, advance, garnishee, stock purchase, speeding ticket and custom types.
• Take-home pay calculator — works backwards: enter the net pay an employee should take home and it calculates the gross salary needed plus the full cost to company.
• Pay periods — configured per company (for example the 25th of one month to the 24th of the next), not hardcoded, so weekly, fortnightly and monthly clients are all catered for.

For clients in the motor industry under MIBCO, HR Hero runs a complete second payroll engine that follows the MIBCO Industry Guide rather than ordinary private-sector rules.

MIBCO settings

• Rate periods — council levy, provident fund, union and SAMF rates, each bracketed by date. MIBCO reissues these every few months, so a new period is added rather than the old one edited, and last month's payslips still recalculate on last month's rates.
• Occupations — MIBCO's own occupational codes.
• Wage schedule — occupation code by rate period, giving the prescribed weekly wage.
• MIBCO calendar — how many weeks MIBCO bills for in each month, from the sheet MIBCO sends every January.
• Employees — who is on the MIBCO roll, on what code, at what wage, and in which union.

What is calculated

• Council levy (employee and employer portions, per week)
• Provident fund (employee and employer percentages of the weekly wage)
• NUMSA union subscription (percentage of earnings)
• MISA union subscription (Bronze / Silver / Gold weekly rates)
• SAMF contribution, employer paid, with the additional female rate
• Site-specific weekly add-ons, such as health insurance
• PAYE and UIF alongside the council deductions

The two bases — handled correctly

• Pay is worked out from the hours actually clocked, at the employee's hourly rate.
• Contributions are worked out from the fixed prescribed weekly wage multiplied by the number of weeks MIBCO bills for that month — they do not move with hours. This is exactly what MIBCO expects to receive, and it is the part most payroll systems get wrong.

Rules, calculator and reports

• Shift-start rule — MIBCO pays a shift on the scale of the day the shift started. A shift beginning 18:00 Saturday and ending 06:00 Sunday is a Saturday shift, and every hour of it is ordinary time.
• Configurable overtime and holiday rules — ordinary hours and days per week, unpaid break minutes, overtime multiplier, Sunday split rates and public holiday treatment. Nothing is hardcoded, and worked examples run through the real engine on screen before anyone is paid on them.
• MIBCO calculator — runs the whole roll for a month and shows the working, then writes it to drafts.
• MIBCO payslips — every hour bucket at its own multiplier, every MIBCO deduction named, and the employer's own contributions listed separately. Approve one at a time or in bulk, then print or email.
• MIBCO reports — returns schedule laid out column for column like the spreadsheet you already submit, salaries actually paid, and a one-page summary for the bookkeeper. Every report is built from the payslips themselves, so a return can never say something different to what the employees were paid.

• SARS tax tables — the full PAYE sliding scale, primary / secondary / tertiary rebates, UIF rate and cap and SDL rate, all editable per tax year. A new tax year can be started as a copy of the current one. Age-based rebates apply automatically from the employee's date of birth.
• EMP201 — monthly PAYE, SDL and UIF totals ready for submission, with the employee count and the figures per tax period.
• EMP501 — bi-annual reconciliation of the monthly EMP201 submissions against actual employee tax certificates. Interim (March–August) and Annual (March–February).
• IRP5 / IT3(a) certificates — year-end tax certificate data per employee with certificate numbers, total gross, total PAYE, UIF and the rest of the year's figures.
• Payroll export — CSV export for the bookkeeper or an external accounting package, plus the SARS EMP201 report.
• Bank payment export — generates the bulk EFT salary payment file in the formats used by Standard Bank, FNB, ABSA and Nedbank, reading banking details straight off the employee record.

• Leave management — balances per employee per year, opened automatically. Annual, Sick, Family Responsibility, Maternity, Study and Unpaid. Set up on the BCEA defaults for South Africa (21 days annual, 30 days sick over a three-year cycle, 3 days family responsibility) and adjustable per company. Balances, calendar view and full leave history.
• Leave applications — employees apply online, or request a time adjustment where they missed a clocking, without needing a back-office login. Sick notes can be attached to a sick leave application.
• Approvals dashboard — one screen showing every pending leave and time-adjustment request, approve or decline. A manager only sees the employees who report to them. Approved leave flows through to the balance and the payslip.

• Employee list — add, edit, deactivate and search staff, with department and job title.
• Full employee profile — personal details (name, SA ID, passport, date of birth, gender, address, cell, email), employment (job title, department, start date, probation end, status, day or night shift), pay (hourly rate, hours per month, monthly salary), banking (bank, branch code, account number and type), tax (tax number, UIF number), benefits (medical aid and pension), contacts (next of kin and emergency) and driver's licence number and expiry.
• Onboarding — one form for taking a new employee on, including starter documents.
• Employee documents — a library per employee: ID copy, passport, driver's licence, contract, proof of address, bank statement, certificates, medical records, sick notes and more. Each can carry an expiry date, and expiring documents raise an alert. Uploads are validated against the actual file contents and stored under system-generated names.
• Performance reviews — employee reviews with attendance summaries and South African public holidays taken into account.
• Merge duplicates — where the same person was captured twice, the records merge into one and all attendance, payslips and documents follow.
• Companies — company records, branding, pay period cut-off days, shift setup and the registration details a labour inspector asks for. Multiple companies on one system, each with their own employees, payroll and administrators.

• Employee login — employees log in with their email address and a password, setting their own the first time through an emailed reset link. Self-service password reset, so HR is not resetting passwords.
• What an employee can do — view and download their own payslips, current and historical; view, download and upload their own documents; read company policies and complete policy tests; see available shifts, volunteer for them and see their own confirmed shifts; apply for leave and see their leave balances.
• One person, two roles — where the same email address is both an administrator and an employee, the system asks which portal to open after the password is verified.

• Vehicle register — registration number, make, model, year, colour, VIN and engine number, photo, current odometer, and the employee the vehicle is assigned to.
• Service history — every service logged with date, odometer, service type, provider, description and cost. Next service due by date or by kilometres.
• Licence, insurance and tracking — licence expiry, insurance company, policy number, contact, monthly cost and expiry; tracking company, account number, contact, monthly cost and tracker IMEI.
• Tyre management — brand, type, date fitted, odometer at fitment, cost, and kilometres run since replacement.
• Fuel log — every fill-up with date, station, litres, cost per litre, odometer, fuel type, whether it was a full tank, the employee who filled up and a photo of the receipt. Calculates km per litre and flags anomalies that may indicate fuel theft.
• Vehicle documents — licence discs, registration papers, insurance certificates and other paperwork, stored per vehicle.
• Vehicle reports — cost per vehicle covering fuel, services, tyres, insurance and tracking, for any month or vehicle.
• Vehicle alerts — automatic email reminders for licence expiry, insurance expiry and services due, on a schedule.
• Live GPS tracking Optional module — live vehicle positions on an interactive map, pulled from the GPS provider and linked to the fleet record by tracker IMEI. Trip history, stop reports, speed monitoring and route playback.

• Equipment register Optional module — company equipment with item name, serial number, category, the employee it is assigned to, condition and status. Printable register.
• PPE and tools Optional module — issue and return of PPE, tools and uniforms per employee with cost, issue date and expiry or replacement date. Printable issue list for signature, which is exactly what a health and safety inspection asks for. Expiry warnings by email.
• Employee expenses — employees submit expense claims with a receipt photo; managers approve or reject, and every decision is recorded with who approved it and when.

• Policy library — upload company policies as documents with a category, description, effective date and review date. Mark a policy mandatory or allocate it to specific employees only.
• Policy tests — build a comprehension test per policy, set the pass mark, and require employees to pass it after reading.
• Sending and tracking — send a policy or its test to staff by email. Results and analytics show who has read what, who has passed, who has failed and who has not opened it at all, with red flags where a test was attempted with no matching policy view.

Everything a Department of Employment and Labour inspector asks for, on one screen, in the order they ask for it. Each item says whether it is ready and links straight to the print view or the document. Nothing is invented — the pack is a view over records the system already holds, so the inspector's copy matches the books.

• Basic particulars of the employer — the inspector's own form, in their wording and order, filled from the company record and employee list. Anything not captured prints as a blank line to be completed by hand on the day.
• Attendance register — one A4 page per employee showing three months side by side: day, in, out and hours.
• Printable lists — staff list with name, gender, ID number and status; what was paid per month with PAYE and UIF; which employees have a signed contract on file.
• Company document store — CIPC registration certificate, company letterhead, UIF registration certificate and proofs of payment, COIDA registration or letter of good standing and its proofs. Proofs repeat (UIF monthly, COIDA yearly), each carrying the period it covers.
• Gender from SA ID — derived automatically from the ID number where it was never captured, and correctable by hand for passport holders.

• Company reports — cost to company, department budgets and total employer costs for a period.
• Payslip reports — payslip history and totals by employee, department and period.
• Weekly attendance report — last week's attendance per employee, emailed out automatically.
• Dashboard — live figures on the home screen: active employees, clocked in today, awaiting approval and payslips on file, each one clickable. The month-end payroll run is laid out as a numbered strip in the order it must be done: check hours, fix clockings, load extras, confirm tax, run payslips, approve, pay, report. A search box filters every page in the system as you type, with a "jump back in" list of the pages this login used recently.

Automated alerts

• Clock-in reminder and clock-out reminder
• Vehicle licence expiry, vehicle insurance expiry and vehicle service due
• PPE expiry warning and equipment status alert
• Weekly attendance report
• Leave balance reminder
• Payslip run reminder

Scheduling and delivery

• Each alert is switched on or off individually and given its own send time and days of the week. One scheduler runs the lot, so there is nothing for you to maintain.
• Email queue — every scheduled and pending email in one place, with what was sent, to whom, and whether it went through.
• Unsubscribe — employees can unsubscribe from alert emails through a secure link in the email itself.

• Roles — Super Admin (every company on the system), Owner (their own company in full), Manager (approvals only, and only for the employees who report to them) and User (full access to their own company).
• Duties — on top of the role, each login is given tick-box duties: Employees, Documents, Reviews, Companies, Clock & Hours, Shift Scheduler, Roster, Approvals, Leave, Payslips, Payroll Reports, Loans & Deductions, Exports & Banking, SARS & Tax, SARS Tax Tables, MIBCO, Vehicles & Fuel, Equipment & PPE, Policies & Tests, Admin Users, Online Activity, Email Alerts and Face Enrolment. A login only sees the menu items it may open, and the page itself refuses access — nothing is merely hidden.
• Reporting lines — employees are assigned to managers, and a manager's approvals, reports and employee lists are automatically limited to their own people.
• Two-factor authentication Optional module — admin logins protected with an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy), set up by scanning a QR code.
• Password management — self-service reset by email for administrators and employees, plus bulk password setting by an owner or super admin.
• Session and application security — hardened session cookies, 30-minute inactivity timeout, CSRF protection on forms, rate limiting on logins and a strict content security policy. File uploads are content-checked, not just extension-checked, and documents are never served straight out of a public folder — each download passes a permission check first.
• Activity log and audit trail — who logged in, when, from what IP address and on what device or browser, for both administrators and employees; which employee opened which policy and which document, and when. Filterable by date range, user type and name.

• 100% cloud based. Nothing to install.
• Works on any device: a tablet in kiosk mode at reception, a cellphone for remote workers, a desktop for the back office. Fully responsive.
• No clocking hardware required — any device with a camera becomes the clock.
• Each company gets its own installation, its own branding (name, colours and logo) and its own settings.
• Optional modules are switched on per client, so nobody pays for or navigates around features they do not use.
• Set-up and onboarding are done for you, typically inside a day.
• Custom work per industry is supported. MIBCO support is exactly that — a bargaining council requirement built into the core product.
• Pricing as advertised: R50 per employee per month, all features included, unlimited administrators and managers, free setup and onboarding support, no long contracts.

HR Hero is already running in these industries, and the motor industry is fully covered through MIBCO bargaining council support.

• Construction
• Restaurants & Hospitality
• Retail
• Logistics & Transport
• Healthcare
• Manufacturing
• Agriculture
• Property Management
• Cleaning Services
• Security
• IT & Tech
• Motor industry (MIBCO)