HR and Employee Self-Service Portal

The problem this solves

SAP Business One ships an Employee Master Data record, and most companies stop there. The employee list lives in B1, but the work of HR lives somewhere else entirely: leave balances in a shared spreadsheet, approvals in email threads, payslip PDFs attached to individual messages, passport and visa expiry dates in a calendar reminder somebody set up two years ago, and appraisal notes in a folder nobody can find at review time.

The cost is not just admin hours. It is a leave balance that disagrees with what payroll paid, an approval nobody can evidence when it is challenged, a work permit that lapsed because the reminder was on a laptop that left the company, and an HR team that spends its month answering "how many days do I have left?" instead of doing HR.

Every one of those facts already has a home in SAP Business One. What is missing is a way for employees and line managers to read and write them without a B1 licence, a client install, or an HR administrator in the middle.

What ECOSIRE builds

ECOSIRE builds you a browser-based self-service portal that sits directly on top of your SAP Business One company database. It is not a separate HR system with a nightly sync — it reads and writes B1 objects through the Service Layer (REST) and the DI API, so B1 stays the single source of truth for every employee fact.

Employee master data, exposed safely

Employees sign in and see their own record drawn from EmployeesInfo: job title, department, branch, manager, cost centre, start date, and the contact and emergency-contact fields you choose to expose. You decide, field by field, what is visible, what is editable by the employee, and what change requires HR approval before it is written back. Nothing is duplicated into a shadow table — the portal writes to the employee master, and B1 shows the result immediately.

Leave requests and balances

Leave types, accrual rules, carry-forward caps and entitlement per grade are modelled as User-Defined Tables (UDTs) with a User-Defined Object (UDO) for the request document itself, so each request is a first-class B1 object with its own object code, document numbering, audit trail and Crystal Reports layout. Employees submit a request against a leave type; the portal validates it against the accrued balance, blocked dates and the public-holiday calendar before it is allowed through.

Approvals route through the employee's manager chain, resolved from the manager field on the employee master. Where you want HR sign-off enforced inside B1 rather than in the portal, ECOSIRE wires the request UDO into a B1 approval procedure so the approval sits in the standard B1 approvals inbox alongside your document approvals.

Payslip access

The portal gives each employee a self-service archive of their own payslips. Because payroll runs differ from country to country, ECOSIRE scopes this to your actual process at the quotation stage: payslip documents can be published from an existing payroll output and attached against the employee via the B1 Attachments folder, or generated as a Crystal Reports layout over the payroll figures you already post to B1 as Journal Entries. Access is strictly scoped — an employee sees their own documents and nothing else, and every retrieval is logged.

Document expiry alerts

Passports, ID cards, visas, work permits, driving licences, medical certificates and professional registrations are held as User-Defined Fields (UDFs) on the employee master or as rows in a documents UDT where an employee can hold many. A scheduled job walks those dates on your chosen cadence and raises escalating notifications — to the employee, the line manager and HR — at the lead times you specify. Alerts can be delivered as email and as native B1 messages, so an HR user working inside the client sees them without leaving it.

Appraisal tracking

Appraisal cycles, objectives, ratings scales and reviewer assignments are modelled as UDOs with the review history retained per employee. Managers complete reviews in the portal; the completed appraisal becomes a queryable B1 object you can report on across a department or a period, rather than a document in a folder.

Reporting and integration points

Headcount, leave liability, upcoming expiries and appraisal completion are delivered as Crystal Reports layouts and B1 queries so they run inside the client your finance team already uses. Where hours or leave must reach payroll or project costing, the portal exposes the approved data for export or for a direct feed, agreed during scoping.

Who this is for

SMEs already running SAP Business One 10.0 with somewhere between roughly twenty and several hundred employees — large enough that spreadsheet HR is failing, not large enough to justify a separate enterprise HCM platform and its per-seat cost. It fits multi-branch and multi-company operations, and it is particularly relevant where document expiry carries legal consequence: GCC and wider Middle East employers managing visas and labour cards, and any business employing licensed or certificated staff.

How delivery works

This app is built to order. Nothing is pre-packaged and nothing downloads instantly.

1. Scoping call. We review your B1 version and database platform, your leave policy, your approval hierarchy, how payroll currently produces payslips, which documents you track, and your appraisal cycle. Multi-company and multi-branch requirements are established here. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope with the object model, the field-level visibility matrix, the integration points and a fixed price with a delivery date. No hourly open-ended billing. 3. Build. ECOSIRE develops the add-on against a copy of your database structure. Typical lead time is one working week from a signed scope, depending on how many leave rules and document types are in play. 4. Install in test. The add-on is installed into your test company database first. You run your real leave scenarios, your real approval chain and your real edge cases against it. Adjustments inside the agreed scope happen here. 5. Install in production. Once you sign off on test, ECOSIRE installs into the production company database, including the UDF, UDT and UDO creation, the approval-procedure wiring and the scheduled alert job. 6. Support window. A defect-fix support window follows go-live, with a documented route for extensions and change requests after it.

Delivery is per-tenant. Your build is yours: you receive the source, the installer and the documentation, and there is no dependency on a shared multi-tenant service to keep it running.