New HR Management Tool for Small Businesses

As our small businesses grow we need tools to help us manage that growth. I know first hand from my days as an HR consultant that many small businesses are woefully underprepared when it comes to managing the human resources side of their businesses.

That’s why when Vincent Chan, developer of Backbone HRM 2.0, contacted me about a beta test of his new software I agreed to pass along the information to you all.

Below is an overview of what Backbone is, and how it may help your business from an HR perspective. Vincent is offering to let  our readers beta test this application for him, and is donating $1 to Kiva.org for every beta tester he gets.

How to Sign Up

Simply go to: http://backbonehr.com and click on “Join the Beta”

Enter your invite code: smallbizbee2010

Try it Out – Give Your Feedback

If you are looking for an HR solution give this one a try and then give Vincent your honest feedback. I’m  not making an endorsement one way or the other of the product yet, just that it looks interesting and I’ll be trying it out with you all. And it’s free to try – you know we like that.

Here’s what Vincent had to say about his new product…

What’s Backbone HRM All About?

Backbone is a simple but powerful human resource management tool for small business. Unlike other complicated enterprise HR systems, Backbone is built for small business from day one. It was created to make solving simple HR issues simple. We look at the needs of small business, include the best features, and take away everything else.

Traditional enterprise HR management systems are too expensive and difficult to use, especially for small business. Because of these reasons, many small businesses hack together solutions for many of their HR problems with Microsoft Excel, pen and paper, or nothing at all. We want to reduce the technology gap between large enterprise and small business.

Backbone enables workers to take care of their own HR operational tasks. It streamlines the processes for submitting and approving employee leave. Employees use it to view their absence balances, record their time off requests, and track the approval status. Managers can look at employees’ current, planned, and historical absence events; monitor absence trends as a predictor for employee engagement.

Besides traditional HR features like Attendance Tracking, Expense Reporting and Goal Management, we also integrate numerous Web 2.0 features into this application. For example, Backbone allows users to securely post updates of their activities, follow others’ updates, and share great resources to co-workers. This is similar to what people are already doing in social networks. However, we take it one step further. In the Backbone’s Dashboard, users not only can see group and personal updates but also other business activities happening inside the application. In this way, managers can monitor all activity in one single place. In short: Backbone will completely transform the way you collaborate with people in your company.

Backbone also provides important HR metrics and charts in different Analytic dashboards, which help small businesses better understanding their HR’s overall performance and employee productivity. With Backbone, small business will stay on top of everything that’s happening in the company with updates on people, groups, documents, and application data. Managers will find experts and discover new information in the activity feed. Together with a clean and intuitive interface, Backbone simplifies HR management so small business can focus on developing their talented workforce.

Benefits of Backbone HRM

- Make information about company activities more visible, accessible and measurable

- Help small businesses gain control over and do more with their workforce

- Give managers rich insights into their workforce

- Save time, improving HR operational efficiency

- Identify employees’ hidden talents

- Foster a more inclusive and collaborative culture

- Better retention and higher productivity

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