The core
The core HRIS. All of it, on every plan.
Everything an early team needs to run HR is here: people, leave, attendance, onboarding, documents, workflows, self-service and reports. All of it is on every plan, including the free one.
If a feature below carries a price, we made a mistake; tell us and we will fix the page or the product.
Six places somebody opens
HR, a manager, and the employee themselves. One of the six closes on a boundary, a plain statement of where the core stops and a module or your payroll partner starts, because a limit you learn before buying is a feature.
Opened by HR
People & Org
Capstan keeps every employee and contractor in one directory with profiles, custom fields, reporting lines and an org chart that is always current, because it is generated from the records rather than drawn by hand.
- Employees and contractors in the same directory, org chart and reporting, no parallel spreadsheet for non-employees.
- Custom fields with types and validation, so "T-shirt size" and "PAN number" are not both free text.
- Effective-dated changes: promotions and transfers take effect on their date, and history is queryable.
Opened by every employee, and their approver
Time Off
Leave management in Capstan handles multiple policies, regional holiday calendars and approval chains, so a team split across Berlin and Bengaluru accrues and books leave under the right rules automatically.
- Policy per entity, region or grade: accrual rules, carry-over, negative balances, encashment flags.
- Holiday calendars per location, applied automatically by each person’s work location.
- Approvals from the notification itself; balances visible to the employee before they ask.
Opened by every employee, and their manager
Attendance
Core attendance is a two-tap punch with timesheets and approvals, built for desk-based teams that need presence records without biometric terminals.
- Punch in two taps, from web or phone; corrections go through an approval, not an admin ticket.
- A punch taken with no network queues on the device and replays in order when you are back, each one carrying an idempotency key so a replay cannot double-punch you. Offline stops at the punch on purpose: balances, documents and approvals are never cached, because a stale approval read offline misleads in a way that matters.
- Timesheets roll up for approval with exceptions surfaced first.
- Presence data feeds the leave and payroll modules without export-import.
Where the core stops
Advanced shifts, rosters, rotation and overtime rules live in the Time & Attendance (Advanced) module, and hardware terminals are not in v1. Payroll is partner-integration mode: Capstan compiles every payroll input and hands a clean export to your payroll partner, the statutory maths is theirs, the system of record is ours.
Opened by HR, and each task owner
Onboarding & Exits
Onboarding and exit checklists in Capstan assign tasks to the right owners with due dates tied to the start or exit date, so a new joiner’s first day is prepared before it happens rather than reconstructed after.
- Checklist templates per role or entity; tasks assign themselves when a start date is set.
- Document collection with expiry tracking is part of the flow, not a separate chase.
- Exits enforce the checklist: access, assets and final documents before the record closes.
Opened by HR
Documents & Letters
Capstan stores people documents with expiry tracking and generates letters, offers, addresses, experience, from templates filled with record data, signed and filed against the person automatically.
- Templates with merge fields from the actual record; no copy-paste-rename rituals.
- Expiry tracking with reminders for visas, certifications and IDs.
- Every generated letter files itself on the profile with an audit trail.
Opened by every employee, without asking HR
Self-Service
Employees see and manage their own record, profile, leave, documents, requests, from web and mobile, which removes the majority of routine HR tickets by making the answer visible.
- Profile edits route through approval where you configure it, straight through where you don’t.
- Leave balances, holiday calendar and payslip access without asking anyone.
- The app is included on every plan; charging for it is the old world’s trick. It is a progressive web app, so it installs to a phone home screen straight from the browser, needs no app store, and updates when the product does with no store review queue in between.
What runs underneath them
The other two are not screens you set out to visit. You meet them from inside something else: an approval that arrives, a change you go looking for months later. They are the same engine and the same log for every surface above and for every module you ever turn on.
Under all six
- People & Org
- Time Off
- Attendance
- Onboarding & Exits
- Documents & Letters
- Self-Service
Workflows
The workflow engine routes any request, data changes, letters, custom approvals, through configurable chains with delegation and escalation, and it is the same engine every module uses.
- Approval chains by org structure, role or named person, with out-of-office delegation.
- Escalations fire on elapsed time, not on someone remembering.
- Every step is audit-logged: who, what, when, from where.
Reports & Audit
Core reporting covers headcount, leave, attendance and every list you can filter, exportable in open formats, and every change in the workspace lands in a log with the actor and the timestamp on it.
- Any filtered list exports as CSV, and scheduled report delivery is on every plan.
- Standard reports: headcount, joiners/leavers, leave liability, attendance exceptions.
- Your own audit trail, not only ours: an admin opens the activity log in the product, filters by action, record type or date, and exports it for their own auditor without asking us for anything. It is append-only, updates and deletes are revoked in the database, and it is on every plan, because an audit trail you have to buy is not an audit trail.
- Every database function in the product is checked against what the test suites actually execute, and one that nothing calls fails the build by name.
Where the core stops
Cohort analytics, trends and custom report building live in the Advanced Analytics module.
Where the core stops
Four things the core deliberately does not do, collected here with the module or the partner that takes each one. Each is a decision about where the core ends, not a gap, and each module page publishes what that module does not do either.
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Shifts, rosters and overtime rules
The core punch records presence and nothing more. Shift definitions, roster scheduling, rotation patterns, swap requests and overtime rules sit on top of it.
Time & Attendance (Advanced) -
Statutory payroll
Your payroll partner computes gross to net and files it. Capstan holds no rate, slab or formula anywhere, compiles every input it already has, and files the returned payslips back onto the record.
Payroll -
Cohorts, trends and custom reports
Core reporting filters and exports what you already hold. A dataset catalogue, a report builder, dashboards and sanctioned cross-module joins are a module.
Advanced Analytics -
A former employee’s own documents
The core closes a record at exit. Keeping someone’s own payslips and letters self-serve on their personal email, years after the work address is switched off, is a module.
Alumni Access
Fourteen modules in all. Two of them, Payroll and Time and Attendance, come with any paid plan at no extra charge; the rest are bought and cancelled on their own. See the catalogue.
Every area on this page is in the free plan, not a trial of it.