A Japanese-affiliated SME in Germany tried implementing Personio ― [Part 3] Approval Workflows, Automation, and Document Management

This is Ito from Berlin.

With Classmethod Europe (German entity) reaching 16 employees, we switched our time and attendance/HR system from Timetac to Personio. In this series, we share insights gained from the implementation, presenting each feature as a hands-on walkthrough.

In Part 1, we covered the background of the switch and DATEV integration. In Part 2, we looked at attendance management (Attendance & Time off) and briefly touched on approval workflows.

In this article, we dive deeper into those approval features while also introducing automation capabilities such as notifications and scheduled processing. We also cover HR document creation and signing, which was not available in Timetac.
These are important features for reducing operational burden and eliminating single points of failure in SME back offices with limited staff.

Approval Workflows

Approval workflows are technically part of Personio's Automations feature (described later), but since only Admin users can manage the settings and they differ in nature from other automations, we treat them separately here.

What Can Be Put Under Approval

(1) Attendance Requests

• Personio: Exceptional attendance entries that match specific conditions
• Timetac: Past attendance entries beyond a specified number of days

Timetac's attendance requests apply to past attendance entries or updates that are before the attendance lock (see Part 2 for details) and beyond a specified number of days.

In Personio, employees cannot be made to submit edit requests for attendance entries beyond a specified number of days. This doesn't happen often, but the absence of this feature is slightly inconvenient.
However, attendance requests in Personio can target violations of rules such as ArbZG (Working Hours Act), and by combining pre-entry warnings with an approval process, you can efficiently prevent rule violations.

(2) Time Off Requests

While Timetac used a permissions-based approach with fixed approvers for all departments and all administrators, Personio makes it very convenient to flexibly manage approval steps and exception conditions per leave type.
For example, in our company, shift workers routinely take compensatory time off for working on holidays. We were able to configure it so that only shift workers can take such compensatory leave without approval, while other members require approval.

(3) Changes to Employee Data (Personio only)

Timetac barely manages employee data at all, so this concept simply doesn't exist there.

In Personio, you can have employees enter important data directly—such as addresses, bank accounts, and contract terms that directly affect payroll—while controlling that it cannot be freely modified without approval. The ability to track who changed what and when is also powerful from an internal controls and audit response perspective.

How Approvals Are Delivered and the UI

As mentioned in Part 2, there is a key difference: Timetac is "pull-type" (approvers go to a request list to check), while Personio is "push-type" (requests arrive in the approver's notification inbox).

Timetac approval screen (attendance change)

Personio approval request in the notification inbox

Personio does have a request list screen, but it is only for checking statuses—approvals cannot be performed there.
We found Personio's approach, where only the requests you need to approve are delivered to you, to be clearer and more efficient for the approval process.

Flexible Approval Settings

While Timetac is permissions-based and sets all department redundancies and all administrators as approvers, Personio allows you to designate multiple arbitrary users or groups as approvers.
Furthermore, you can configure exception conditions to apply a different flow only to specific targets, and delegated approvers who automatically take over if approval is not given within a deadline. This makes it easier to avoid approval bottlenecks and single points of failure even in SMEs with limited staff.

Scheduled and Event-Triggered Automated Processing

What had barely been managed through cumbersome reminder notifications across different tools and ad-hoc, person-dependent operations has been naturally migrated into a "system" through this automation.

You can configure custom automated processes triggered by events such as scheduled times or employee data changes.
In our company, we set up configurations such as the following:

• 👤 Notify the manager, HR, internal IT, and supervisor two weeks before a new employee's start date
• 🔄 When an employee's weekly working hours change, create a task for HR to issue a contract document and a task for the administrator to adjust the Work schedule
• ⏰ Notify all employees about remaining paid leave at year-end, notify leaders to check remaining balances, and create a task for HR to report the number of days to the accounting firm
• ⌛ Send HR reminder notifications 3 months / 1.5 months / on the day before an employee's visa expires
• 📋 On the 3rd of every month, notify team leaders to review their members' attendance
• 🚃 On the 1st of every month, notify employees based in Germany to submit their German train pass (Deutschlandticket)

Monthly reminders and the time spent by staff individually checking details and reaching out have been significantly reduced.

The notification inbox displays approval requests and configured automatic notifications as follows.

💡 Notifications, tasks, and reminders all arrive in the notification inbox. When one of the designated recipients checks off a task, it is archived from everyone's notification inbox, but notifications and reminders are archived individually by each person.

Creating an Automation

This time, we'll create an approval workflow for attendance requests. Feel free to skip this section if you just want to understand the concept.

Open the Automations menu. The top page shows the status of onboarding and offboarding, links to pending approval requests, and the status of document signing requests.

Click the [Create workflow] button to create a new workflow. You can create from scratch or from a template. This time, we select the second option under Approvals.

Edit the flowchart as follows to create the steps for approval and rejection.

• Request trigger conditions:
  • (Template default) Daily working hours exceed the maximum, or breaks are shorter than required
  • Or, start time is 3 hours earlier or end time is 5 hours later than the configured Work schedule
• Approver: The target user's Supervisor
• Action: Notify the target user with a message for each of approval and rejection

Let's verify the behavior. Enter an attendance record with a late-night start time for a certain user. By default, entered attendance is immediately Approved, but since it matches the trigger condition and is going through the approval workflow, it becomes Pending.

A notification has arrived in the supervisor user's Inbox. Clicking it allows you to review the details as shown below. This time, let's click Reject.

Returning to the user who entered the attendance, the configured rejection message has arrived in their Inbox. Also, the attendance record that was entered has changed from Pending to Rejected status.

As shown, automated processing and approval workflows can be configured through a relatively intuitive UI.

Document Creation and Electronic Signatures

As seen in the Automations menu screen earlier, document signing can also be digitized and turned into a workflow.

HR document creation and signing is an area that tends to rely on manual work by the person in charge and become person-dependent, especially in smaller offices. With Personio, the entire process from document management and creation to signing can be completed in one place.

Document Management Linked to Employees

• What you can do:
  • Create and upload documents linked to each employee − Payroll and contract-related documents created externally, maternity leave certificates linked to maternity leave requests, and more can all be centrally managed here.
  • View all employees' documents together from the Documents menu, organized by category
  • Grant an External user account to an external accounting firm so they can directly access materials in specific categories
• What you cannot do:
  • Manage documents not linked to an employee − It is more appropriate to store company-wide HR-related materials in SharePoint, or in an accounting tool if they relate to accounting as HR costs.

💡 Through granular permission settings, it is also possible to grant access to the Documents menu while restricting viewing and editing to only specific categories or specific users' documents.

Creating Documents from Templates

Even more convenient is the ability to prepare document templates and generate documents electronically from them.

In our company, we have prepared employment verification letters in three templates—German (general purpose), German (detailed for specific use cases), and English—allowing employees to create them and request signatures directly in Personio.

Using Placeholders, employee data such as names and addresses can be automatically pulled from the information registered in Personio, eliminating the need for manual entry. Information that is not registered can also be filled in via selection or auto-fill.

This enables remarkable efficiency gains for documents that use the same format repeatedly.

In the case of employment verification letters, the person in charge used to edit and create a Word document each time a request came in, but now their only task is to apply an electronic signature in Personio.

Electronic Signatures (No DocuSign Required)

Multiple signers can be specified for a document. The specified signers receive a signing request in their notification inbox.

Electronic signatures integrated into Personio are available by default, and no separate DocuSign license is required. This is also a significant cost benefit for SMEs.

Creating Document Templates

Templates are created in Word just like regular documents, but with Placeholders written according to Personio's syntax.

Placeholders include Predefined/Custom types that automatically pull employee data, and Free types that allow free-form text or selection-style inputs.

https://support.personio.de/hc/en-us/articles/115002763969-Create-Document-Templates-Placeholders

For example, by specifying a gender-based placeholder and a formatted date as follows:

||Mr.|Ms.| | || {{first_name}} {{last_name}}, date of birth {{date_of_birth | d.m.Y}}

The employee data is automatically filled in on screen as follows:

Ms. User TEST, date of birth 01.01.2020

Summary

The approval workflows, automations, and document creation features introduced in this article are all aimed at "reducing manual work and single points of failure."
While it takes effort to think through the requirements and design the setup, carefully building this foundation allows you to create a robust organizational structure where back-office workload does not scale up as headcount grows.

After implementation, we have gradually increased the number of automations and document types, and have been able to dramatically reduce repetitive manual tasks.

Classmethod Europe supports European offices with back-office operations and system selection, drawing on our own hands-on operational experience. Please feel free to reach out.

https://www.classmethod.de