People
When HR refuses
The guards on people records, what each one is protecting, and what to do instead.
Almost every refusal on a people record protects the same thing: a figure somebody was paid, told or filed under, which has to stay reproducible afterwards. Here is each one and the way round it.
Editing a person
| What you tried | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Add somebody with a work email already in use | Two records for one person splits a leave balance and files payroll twice. | Find the existing record. An absent email is never treated as a match — it cannot be a key, and whole workforces have none. |
| Change a salary in place | A payslip was issued under the old figure, and a payroll snapshot re-read in two years has to reproduce what was filed. | Record a new pay record from the date it takes effect. The previous one closes the day before and stays readable. |
| Record pay for somebody holding two engagements without saying which | It would be claimed by whichever engagement started later, and one entity would file a salary belonging to the other. | Name the engagement. See Engagements. |
| Approve or apply your own pay change | Nobody decides their own pay, HR administrator or not. | Somebody else does it. The panel is absent on your own record rather than present and refusing. |
| Record a right to work with no expiry | An exemption or an appeal has no expiry date, so nothing would ever bring it back to anybody's attention. | Give it a review date. See Right to work. |
| Record a rejected application as granting work | A rejection grants nothing. Under appeal is the state where work continues. | Record the appeal instead, if one is filed. |
| Upload an executed agreement without saying how it was signed | Signed somehow is not an answer, and which method was used decides whether an authority demanding a wet original is satisfied. | Say whether it was wet-signed, electronic or through a provider. See Signing. |
| Send a contract electronically where a wet signature was demanded | Somebody outside recorded that a hand-signed original is needed. Sending anyway produces a document that looks complete and is refused at a counter. | Print it, sign it and upload the scan. |
Leave, time and approvals
| What you tried | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Approve your own leave | The subject is removed from every step before anything else is decided. | It goes to your manager. If you genuinely have none, self-approval is permitted and recorded as such — see Approvals. |
| Edit a leave ledger entry | The ledger is insert-only. A balance is the sum of its entries, and editing one would change a figure somebody was already told. | Post a reversal, which points at the original and leaves both readable. |
| Delete a leave policy the ledger points at | That link is how somebody answers under what rules an absence was credited. | Stop using it. Nothing recalculates: existing entries carry their own policy and their own minutes. |
| Save an entitlement below the statutory minimum on the same policy | It would save cleanly and quietly underpay every person it applied to. | Raise the entitlement, or correct the minimum if it is wrong. |
| Edit a locked attendance entry | It has been consumed by a payroll snapshot. | Record a correcting entry in a later period, exactly as the leave ledger posts a reversal. |
| Approve your own recorded time | An hourly worker signing off their own overtime is not a control. | Somebody else approves it. See Time and attendance. |
| Save an overtime rule with no thresholds at all | No rule is reported honestly as no premium calculated. An empty one looks configured and silently pays everything at single time. | Give it a threshold, or delete it and let the honest answer stand. |
| Delete an overtime rule that has classified approved time | An approved entry does not store the rate it was banded at, so removing the rule would make an old timesheet unexplainable. | It is closed off with an end date instead, which happens for you. |
Structure and settings
- A working pattern any engagement still uses cannot be deleted. The link would null, leaving everybody on it with no scheduled hours at all — silently, and all at once.
- A holiday calendar holding past dates cannot be deleted. Absences were costed around those days, and under calendar-day counting they were deducted from somebody's balance.
- A credential class in use cannot be removed from its type. It would not remove it from anybody's record, only stop it being recognised.
- A cost centre people still bill to cannot be deleted, and its parents are cycle-checked, because a loop would make cost roll-up recurse forever.
- A checklist or agreement template that has been used is deactivated rather than deleted — it answers which version of your onboarding somebody went through.
- An approval chain with neither self-approval nor an HR fallback is refused. It would block a managing director's own request permanently.
The pattern behind all of it
Where a change would leave a past figure unexplainable, it is refused. Where it would only affect what happens next, it is allowed and nothing recalculates. See Settings for the same question asked of every editor, and Entities, patterns and cost centres for the structural ones.