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Business-Gym Docs

HR

Business-Gym has no HR module — no absence calendar, no applicant tracker, no payroll run. What HR gets is the same machinery every other department uses: a shared mailbox bound to an HR Head, your HR documents in the knowledge base, a people directory with a consent gate on it, tasks on a board, and an approval queue with a person in it.

That is less than an HR suite and more useful than it sounds, because most of the load in a 30-person company is reading, drafting and remembering rather than maintaining records in a dedicated system. This page is written for Muster GmbH, a 30-person German SME where one office manager owns HR alongside everything else she does.

What does HR look like in Business-Gym?

Section titled “What does HR look like in Business-Gym?”

It is one HR Head with a written charter, connected to the mailboxes and documents you decide to give it, and running at supervised like every other Head.

The Head ships titled CHRO, with a default charter whose mission is to hire, support and retain the team compliantly. Its stated responsibilities are recruiting and onboarding, time-off and personnel records and labour-law compliance; its decision authority is to draft and track; and its budget authority is none at all. Every field of that charter is yours to edit — see working with a Head.

HR is not switched on in the recommended starter pack. The recommended Back-Office Essentials pack enrols Office, Finance and Accounting only. The HR Head arrives with Operations & Compliance (Office, HR, IT, Legal) or with the Full Department Suite, both of which you can pick during onboarding — see getting started.

Once it is enrolled, the Heads page shows an Inbound responsibilities card listing which Head owns each category of inbound work. The People category — job applications — resolves to the HR Head. If no HR Head is in your roster, that row reads unassigned rather than quietly handing the work to somebody else.

How does an application in jobs@ reach the HR Head?

Section titled “How does an application in jobs@ reach the HR Head?”

It lands in a shared mailbox you bound to the HR Head, gets classified and routed before anyone reads it, and comes back to you as a draft you approve.

You set the binding on the Channels page under Build, which exists to “bind shared mailboxes to a Head and set how far each one may act”. A Muster-GmbH setup binds jobs@ and bewerbung@ to HR while rechnung@ goes to Accounting, so an application and an invoice never sit in the same pile. Each mailbox row carries an Autonomy mode: a new mailbox is created Read-only — triage and digest only, no replies sent — and you move it to Draft & stage, where drafts wait for your approval, once the routing looks right.

An application is classified with the intent application, which is what routes it to HR. On the Inbound page each row offers the same verbs as any other item:

  • Draft reply — composes an acknowledgement, an invitation or a decline and opens it inline to edit.
  • Create task — turns the item into work rather than an answer.
  • Forward — hands the thread to a colleague or another Head. This creates a task, not an email.
  • File — keeps it in the Head’s knowledge with no reply.
  • Dismiss — marks it handled and drops it out of the active queue.

When the wording is right you click Send reply. That click is the approval, and there is no code path that skips it. The rhythm of working the queue is covered in the inbound triage cockpit.

Where do employee records live, and who can see them?

Section titled “Where do employee records live, and who can see them?”

They live on the People page under Admin, and by default no Head can see any of them.

A Person there is an employment record — name, role, department, team, manager, job description, key responsibilities, skills, working schedule and a contact handle. It is deliberately separate from Team, which manages app accounts and their four roles (owner, admin, approver, read). Being in the directory does not give someone a login, and having a login does not put them in the directory. The page has two views: Directory and Org chart, the second drawn from each person’s manager, with people who have no manager shown as roots.

Two independent switches decide whether an agent can see a person at all, and it takes both:

  • Active — an inactive person is excluded from every agent read, from the org chart and from counts, and deactivating someone forces their opt-in off.
  • Agent coordination (strict opt-in) — off by default. While it is off, the product states it plainly: “Agents cannot see this person.”

Even when the opt-in is on, the What your Heads can see panel lists exactly what is shared — role, department, team, skills, working schedule and contact — under the line “Coordination fields only — never private data.” The job description, responsibilities and manager relationship are not in that list.

The employee grants their own consent. Each person has a My profile & consent page that matches them to their own record by their account email, explains what agent coordination means, and offers Opt in and Revoke. The decision is audited as self-service. If no record matches their email the page says so instead of guessing, and if two records share an email it refuses to set consent at all until an admin fixes the duplicate.

Getting your team in takes one of two routes, both admin-only:

  • Import takes a CSV or Excel file, lets you map each column to a field, and previews what would happen before anything is written — flagging rows as Missing name, Already in directory, Duplicate in file or Manager not found, then reporting how many were created and how many skipped. Imported people arrive with agent coordination off, consent pending.
  • AI extract takes a PDF or DOCX — a CV or a contract — or pasted text, and pre-fills one person. Fields it inferred are flagged inferred, weak ones are flagged verify, and anything the document did not state is shown as not stated rather than filled in. The person is created inactive and agent-invisible until a human reviews the fields and activates them.

Members who are not admins see the directory read-only, with a View only label instead of the edit controls, and the server re-checks the role on every write. Who holds which role is covered in who can approve, and where.

How do your HR documents become answers?

Section titled “How do your HR documents become answers?”

You add them on the Knowledge Base page and scope them to the HR head, after which the Head drafts from those documents instead of from general knowledge.

Two routes get them in: a Microsoft 365 sync over the OneDrive or SharePoint folders you pick, and direct upload of files, a whole folder, a URL or typed text. Both are one-way. Nothing is written back into SharePoint, so syncing a personnel folder cannot modify it.

Scope is the part that matters for HR. Every synced folder and every upload carries either tenant-wide or a single head, and a head retrieves only chunks in its own scope. A library whose name contains HR, Human Resources, Personal, People, Recruiting, Payroll or Lohn is inferred to the HR head automatically; an explicit scope you set during onboarding beats the guess; and a name that matches nothing falls back to tenant-wide rather than guessing a department.

The full picture — file types, size limits, what the sync does on each run — is on data sources and knowledge.

What is the HR Head never allowed to decide?

Section titled “What is the HR Head never allowed to decide?”

Four classes of action stay with a person at every autonomy setting, and HR work touches all four in a normal week.

  • Send external communication — every message to a candidate or an employee’s private address.
  • Sign legally — an offer, a contract, an amendment, a termination.
  • Move money — the HR charter grants no spend authority at all.
  • Change permissions — granting or revoking somebody’s access to a system.

This is a design invariant rather than a default you could turn off, and it is described in full on autonomy and the hard floor.

The platform also enforces it below the charter. Any workflow step that sends an email, posts to Teams, calls an arbitrary URL, writes a calendar event or writes into an external system of record is classified as sensitive, and a scheduled run carrying an ungated sensitive step is forced to stop for a human even when the workspace trust setting says auto. On top of that, the panic switch on the Heads page drops every Head to supervised at once — see the autonomy dial and the panic switch.

What is not built for HR yet?

Section titled “What is not built for HR yet?”

The systems HR normally runs on are not connected, and it is cheaper to read that here than to discover it mid-evaluation.

There is no HRIS, ATS, job-board, payroll or time-tracking connector. Nothing reads an absence balance, nothing writes a payroll record, nothing posts a vacancy to a job board. DATEV is not connected either. The complete list of what each connection may read and write is on integrations.

Payslip distribution is not a product feature. There is no path in the product that delivers a payslip to an employee, and you should not plan a payroll month around one appearing.

The workflow gallery is a set of sketches, not working automation. Under Build → Workflows the template gallery has an HR filter chip with HR-shaped graphs behind it — onboarding, absence tracking, interview scheduling and more. They are starting points: each ships with its target system left blank for you to fill in on the canvas, and several of them reach for exactly the systems listed above as not connected. Treat a card as a description of a procedure you would have to wire up, not as a feature.

There is no HR reporting. Time-to-hire and retention exist as OKR metric names seeded with a target of zero and nothing feeding them, and there is no operations analytics dashboard anywhere in the product. You can track them by hand on the goals page — see goals and OKRs — but the product does not measure them for you.

Calendars are read-only. Business-Gym reads department calendars and does not create or change events, so interview scheduling ends at a proposal you book yourself.

Your approvals do not yet train the drafts. Decisions are recorded rather than fed back into future proposals; what that will and will not change is on how your team learns.

What does an HR week look like at Muster GmbH?

Section titled “What does an HR week look like at Muster GmbH?”

One person can run this as a short daily pass plus one longer block, using the queue itself as the record instead of a separate spreadsheet.

  1. Every morning, ten minutes. Open Inbound, filter to application, and clear the acknowledgements. Draft reply, read it against what the person actually sent, edit rather than rewrite, Send reply. Correct the intent on anything classified wrong before you move on — a wrong category produces a wrong draft however well written it is.
  2. When an interview is agreed. Use Create task so the thread becomes work with an owner and a due date rather than something you have to remember, then put the invitation in your own calendar, because Business-Gym does not create events.
  3. When someone accepts. Add them on People, or use AI extract on the signed contract and check every field before you activate them. Leave agent coordination off; point them at My profile & consent and let them decide for themselves.
  4. When a policy question arrives. Answer it once, then put the source document in the Knowledge Base scoped to the HR head, so the next draft of that answer starts from your handbook rather than from nothing.
  5. Friday, twenty minutes. Work anything left in the approval queue, and give every row still sitting there a named reason — waiting on a colleague, waiting on a connector, or genuinely undecidable this week.

Where should you go next?

Section titled “Where should you go next?”

Three pages carry the detail an HR owner needs before moving a real mailbox or a real personnel folder into Business-Gym.

The same shape applies elsewhere: finance and sales. The glossary explains the terms, and the FAQ covers control and data.