The fastest way to lose an HR audit: have employee data in seven different places.
Spreadsheets on the GM laptop. PDFs in a Dropbox folder. Contracts in a filing cabinet. Bank details in an email thread from 2022. When someone asks “what data do you hold on me?”, the answer takes a week to assemble — and you’re never quite sure it’s complete.
That’s most hotels today. The Personal File module replaces all of it with one living record per employee.
What Personnel File does
Each employee gets a single, structured record: who they are, how they’re paid, what they’ve signed. Employees handle their own contact details. HR keeps control of anything that affects a paycheck. Every action is logged. Every document stays inside the app.
Built for the realities of hotel HR — German payroll fields next to US payroll fields, four languages out of the box, GDPR baked in from day one.
How it works
Employees see their own file. They update phone, email, emergency contact, profile photo — those changes go through instantly.
Anything sensitive — bank account, tax class, address, marital status, legal name — goes into an HR approval queue. The employee sees a clear “needs HR approval” badge before they even start. HR opens one inbox, approves or rejects with a click, and the change applies.
A single morning email summarises what’s waiting and what was applied yesterday. No names, no values, only counts — safe to forward to an accountant.
Key capabilities
- One complete record per employee — personal, employment, payroll, documents
- Self-service for safe fields, HR approval queue for payroll-relevant changes
- Document storage that can’t leak — no shareable links, no public URLs
- One-click GDPR export — full record + documents + activity log as a single archive
- Activity log retained for seven years, with read-access tracking
- Live HR Dashboard — headcount, salary cost per currency, expiring permits, birthdays, anniversaries, new hires
- German + US payroll fields built in — Steuerklasse next to I-9
- Permission tiers — junior HR, senior HR, employee read-only
- Legal name flows everywhere in the app automatically
- Four languages — every label and email follows each user’s preference
Who it’s for
GMs running properties with mixed payroll obligations. HR leads who want one source of truth for headcount, costs, and expiry dates. Compliance officers who need a GDPR export ready in one click, not one week. Multi-property groups that want consistent HR records across hotels.
If your team is still chasing “can you forward me your latest contract?” emails, this is the upgrade.
Why the approval queue matters
Self-service alone is risky — an employee changing their bank account silently the day before payroll runs is exactly the scenario nobody wants. A blanket “HR does everything” model is the opposite problem — slow, expensive, and the source of every “can you update my address” email that drowns the HR inbox.
The split solves both. Employees own what’s safe to own. HR owns what affects pay. Both sides see the audit trail.
Documents that stay inside
Contracts, ID copies, work permits, tax forms — all stored in the file. Visible only to HR and the employee. There are no shareable links anywhere in the system. A document opened in the app stays in that browser session. Nobody can copy a URL and forward it. Nobody can accidentally make a folder public.
That single design choice eliminates the most common HR data-leak vector — a well-meaning manager forwarding a contract PDF link that was supposed to be private.
Built for compliance
Articles 15 and 20 of GDPR require a complete data export on request. Most hotels handle that with panic and a deadline extension. Personal File handles it with one click — data, employment record, every uploaded document, full activity log, packaged as a single archive.
When an employee leaves, the record is preserved for the legally required retention period and then automatically purged. No spreadsheet of “files to delete in three years” required.
The honest part
HR is the part of hotel operations that most software pretends doesn’t exist. Front-of-house tools, channel managers, revenue management — all polished. The HR side is left to spreadsheets and goodwill.
That works until it doesn’t. Until an audit arrives. Until an employee leaves with a grievance. Until someone realises the contract folder has six versions of the same template and nobody’s sure which one was actually signed.
A proper HR record isn’t glamorous. It’s the boring infrastructure that lets the rest of the operation stay calm when something goes wrong.
How does your hotel keep employee records today — and how confident are you that you could pull a complete file in under five minutes?