Next year, myhrtoolkit will celebrate its 10-year anniversary and as the history of myhrtoolkit is quite interesting, but not something we have ever documented, we thought we would tell you about it.

myhrtoolkit from 2005 to 2015

The software was first created as a document management system by Jon Curtis, partner in law firm IronmongerCurtis, as a tool for his clients to help them manage their HR documents. Quickly it was clear that a system such as this was very much in demand and the product was setup as its own business, H2R Ltd.

As more clients signed up the list of features grew, evolving the system from an online document management system to a fully-fledged HR software system, including self-service, holiday management and absence management.

This is quite different to many other HR software companies. The majority are started by software companies, whereas myhrtoolkit was born out of an employment law firm. This means myhrtoolkit is always up to date with changes in employment law and many of the features have HR compliance in mind.

In 2008, H2R was rebranded as myhrtoolkit. With this change, myhrtoolkit set out to be the best, easy to use HR system for small and medium businesses.

Myhrtoolkit is lucky as we have grown steadily and haven’t incurred any business debt; this not only makes the business rock solid, but we can also offer benefits such as 25% discount to registered charities.

Myhrtoolkit is growing all the time; we are regularly breaking growth records and our growth is accelerating. We recently moved offices and it has left us wondering how long it will be before we need even more space.

As 71% of businesses fail before they get to their 10^th birthday, we are very happy to have almost reached this important milestone.

Not many of our competitors could say they have a customer who has been with them 10 years. We had a chat with our longest serving customer, Karen at GB eye Ltd, about their thoughts on myhrtoolkit.

What were you doing before myhrtoolkit?

"We used to manually fill in holiday request forms. These then went to managers for signing and then were passed to me for recording on spreadsheets and updating individual employee records. Sickness information was not always recorded as there wasn’t any procedures in place."

What are the top three features you love about myhrtoolkit?

1. "The holiday chart
2. The history you can access at the touch of a button
3. The amount of information you can store, either at company level or individual level"

How have you seen myhrtoolkit improve over the years?

"The system has developed over the years and now holds a lot more information that it did when we first started using it but the easiness of using it hasn’t changed.

When we first started using myhrtoolkit all we did was record holidays on it, now we use it for recording any type of staff absence, we hold company documents on there and have the ability of hold documents against individuals too.

The information held against each employee has also developed over the years; at first all there was basic information but now you can hold documents against them, training details, pay details etc."

How has myhrtoolkit helped you the most?

"We have saved lots of time as we now don’t have to update employee records individually and the year-end check to see if staff have taken all their holiday entitlement is done at the touch of a button. We don’t have to trawl through paper and spreadsheets anymore.

The audit trail really helps because now the system deals with holidays we don’t have any issues with missing holiday forms and if an employee wants to cancel an holiday they can just log on and do it themselves instead of having to fill in an holiday cancellation form.

It also benefits us as a company having all the absence information in one place so people can see just by logging in who is off sick/on holiday/absent from work on any given day, which saves time when trying to find someone, who isn’t actually in the office.

We have up to date information on each employee instead of having to wait for managers to pass on the signed holiday forms and then wait for them to be updated on a spreadsheet and the individual records."

Why would you recommend myhrtoolkit to other companies?

"I would recommend myhrtoolkit for the time savings of using it, which ultimately has a cost saving benefit too, as the admin side of recording absence has dramatically reduced. You have one main point of contact for absence, saving company documents etc. instead of using various systems."