Hi Leela

I don't work in an education setting but we do use Breathe in our current organisation. It's a fairly straightforward system so it's easy to use but it does have limitations.

It can manage multiple holiday entitlements with automated length of service increases (we have three or four different entitlements set up but you can have as many as you like). However whilst it can pro rata holiday for part years for new starters, it can't pro rata holiday for part time staff, so you end up having to do manual adjustments each year to pro rata holiday entitlements for your part time staff. We have lots of part time staff so this is a bit of a hassle for me, especially as lots of them change their hours throughout the year!

We haven't linked Breathe to payroll, and so we haven't required it to calculate sick pay entitlements (I'm not sure it could), but it does record sickness fairly easily.

Staff find it easy to book holiday and record sickness and generally they seem to find it easy to update.

There are a few custom fields you can use, if you wanted to keep a record of which sets of ts and cs each member of staff was on (we've used our three custom text fields for payroll number (as that's different to the Breathe e'ee number), and to record a couple of bits of diversity data we need to collect for funding purposes).

I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about specific functionality. ;-)

Kind regards

Jackie

In reply to Jacqueline:

Thanks Jackie.
My concern is the complexity of some of our contracts and hours, as well as holiday. Then the various levels of sick pay.
It seems great from the self-service aspect, just concerned that we will still have to do a lot of stuff manually from an HR perspective.

In reply to Leela:

I think that you'll certainly still have to work out sick pay expiry manually (although you'll have a good record of dates of absences from Breathe). At a guess I would say that if your terms are very complicated, Breathe might struggle to record everything you need. But then that might also be true of other systems. There are some HR system providers who do design their systems to accomodate school and public sector Ts and Cs - from my memory I can dredge up iTrent by Midland HR and Ciphr by Computers in Personnel as two who I think were good at that - but they are almost certainly a lot more expensive than Breathe. I've also used Cascade and that was very customisable - you could create as many screens and fields as you liked for recording extra information which might be a better solution for you.

We use Breathe, and have various employees on various part time contracts. You have the ability to set up working time profiles and annual leave profiles according to the specific hours worked - you could literally have a profile for every single employee if they all have slightly different working hours and annual leave profiles! I would recommend Breathe - we’ve been using it for about 4 years, and whilst there has been the odd thing that doesn’t work quite as we’d like it to (the Performance section isn’t massively interactive for example), generally it’s easy to use for both admins and “end users”.

In reply to Maya:

Hi Maya, thanks for your comments, this is great to hear that especially since you have been using it for a number of years too.
On the performance side, I note it seems fine for 121 reminders and such, which is probably enough for us as we have yet to implement the performance reviews for staff properly!

It’ll be perfect for that level of performance review!

In reply to Jacqueline:

Hi Jackie I was looking for help with Breathe and Google brought up this thread can I ask a question?

In our hierarchy we have a General Manager, then two Assistant Managers who each have 6 staff working for them. What we want is for both AM's to have access to each other's staff. I can't see how to do this unless I create a new level in the hierarchy and have one AM above the other, the problem then is that the GM can't see the 12 staff at the bottom. Any idea how to get round this (without making anyone an HR user)?

Hope that makes sense!

Hi there,
I use Breathe for my HR Database but find it quite limiting. It is simple to use, but lacks functionality and the fact that reports aren't customisable is a big disadvantage. As a company we've only been using it for about 18 months, having had nothing before bar an excel spreadsheet, but really we've already outgrown it. I'm currently looking for something more advanced that can grow with my company and that can incorporate recruitment, onboarding, performance management, etc. Breathe has most of these but in such basic forms.
Regards
Anne

In reply to Michael:

Hi Michael
Sorry I didn't spot your post yesterday. I think you will struggle to have two managers accessing the same staff records equally. You could make one the line manager and have the other as holiday approver, but that's about all. We've had the same issue as we have one Visitor Experience Manager and five Assistant VE Managers who are on a rota and we wanted all the Assistant Managers to be able to access all the VE Team Members' records. Unfortunately it just wasn't possible.

As Anne says, it is very much an entry level system - I think it's great value for money for an organisation our size, so we've learned to live with the things it can't do.
Kind regards

Jackie