Customize Your BambooHR Account
Purpose: This help guide includes information about the available options you can use to customize your account for maximum efficiency.
Standard fields library
In your BambooHR account, you will find a list of standard fields you can add to a specific tab on the employee profile. Click Customize Layout in the top right corner of a tab. This will open a new modal showing the fields you can add through Reorder Fields.* To learn more about the standard fields library, click here.
If the field you need is not in the standard fields library, you can add a custom field. Click here to learn how to do that.
Additional customizations
Not all accounts are created in the same way, and this is on purpose. Each HR department manages its employees and data based on their specific business needs.
Depending on the package purchased, you will have the option to add custom fields, tabs, and tables. If you do not have one of these options, you can contact our Customer Support team for assistance. We suggest reviewing how you track the information you want to turn into a custom field, tab, or table to ensure you can easily use it to add and store accurate information in BambooHR.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind that can help you make sure you get the most out of your account.
- Custom tables or fields do not sync with integrations. Integrations built by our partners are based on our standard fields in the system.
- Extensive or complicated tables can become cumbersome. Our research has shown that customers rarely use those tables. BambooHR is clean and user-friendly, and therefore, custom fields should follow that same pattern of ease of use.
- Stored data is specific in employee profiles, but you can pull stored data for a custom report for all applicable employees.
Our Customer Support team can make adjustments to fields in your account to help you track information that matters most to you.
Including the fields shown above, you can use tables to track and store your data historically. Do you need to track employee skills? This type of table can store more than one assigned item and sort the items by a field in ascending or descending order.
Or, do you need to track when employees submit expenses for reimbursement? This historical data would be a great addition to your account, and you can filter data to show the most recent data line or by oldest to newest in descending order.
In your account, our support heroes can mark specific fields as required. Or, if you are using the custom field builder, you can mark a field as required or optional.
When an employee fills out their information, they cannot proceed until they complete all the required fields. Required fields have an asterisk shown next to their field names. This feature helps remind the employee to complete the required fields during onboarding.
Do you have any custom tables that track numbers, percentages, or currencies? If yes, do you find yourself needing to see the total or average of all amounts from each row? This is a situation where our table summarizations* feature comes in handy! For example, our support heroes created an expense table for you. With table summarizations, you can see the total amount of all expenses at the bottom of the table.
*Table summarizations are not reportable.
All employees are required to have an employee number in BambooHR. An employee number is the employee's unique identifier and used for importing information into BambooHR.
If your company does not currently have employee numbers, we can enable auto-numbering in your account. With this feature enabled, each new employee added to BambooHR will automatically receive an employee number. When using auto-numbering, you can select what number you would like to start with, and the system will auto-generate numbers from there. You cannot use alphanumeric values when using the auto-numbering feature.
If you would like to set up auto-numbering in your account, please reach out to our Customer Support team.
Please note that you cannot update employee numbers through importing. You can only import a new employee number if you import the employee into BambooHR for the first time. If you update employee data, you cannot update the employee numbers through importing.
If you would like to change an employee's employee number, you can do this manually by selecting the Employee # field on their employee profile. If you would like to use auto-numbering, first use power edit to delete all your employee numbers and then reach out to a our Customer Support team to initiate auto-numbering.
We can create custom calculations that will calculate currency, dates, or numbers in custom fields. For example, you need to track an employee’s probationary date, which is always 90 days after their hire date. Instead of adding the date manually, we can create a field for you that will automatically show the probationary date based on the hire date entered. Or, maybe you would like to calculate an employee’s projected salary. We can create a custom calculation that will add the current pay rate and the bonus amount for the total compensation the employee receives.
If you need a custom calculation, please contact our Customer Support team to see if we can create it for you!
You can create a custom approval workflow based on the available fields in BambooHR. It is a seamless approval process that saves time and eliminates tedious and time-consuming paperwork.
Perhaps you would like a manager to submit a request for an employee to receive a bonus or an employee to request the opportunity to participate in training courses. Custom approvals can manage this for you!
You can create advanced approval paths for a specific division, department, or location. This ability will help you to manage approvals within your company (Advantage, Core, and Pro customers only).
We hope this guide will help you make the most of your BambooHR account. Be sure to reach out to our Customer Support team to find out more.
Happy Bamboo-ing!