Sage HR Review, Pricing & Features

What is Sage HR?

Sage HR is a human resource software used by small businesses with up to 125 employees. It is used by businesses to create job postings and track applicants and their interview process. Its standout features are its hiring and onboarding, as well as its analytics and reporting.

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Table of Contents

• What is Sage HR?
• Sage HR Review Summary
• Sage HR Pricing & Cost
• Sage HR Features
  • Recruiting
  • Onboarding and Offboarding
  • Time Tracking
  • Workflow Automation
  • Expense Management
  • Performance Management
  • Analytics and Reporting
• Sage HR Integrations
• Sage HR Customer Service
• Sage HR Alternatives & Competitors
• Is Sage HR Right For You?

Sage HR Review Summary

Sage HR launched in 2012 as CakeHR. In 2019, it was acquired by Sage Group, a company that specializes in accounting and business management software. Since then, Sage HR has supported a number of small businesses from its offices in North America and Europe. In general, Sage HR is used by small businesses with up to 125 employees.

Sage HR’s best feature is its job posting. It also supports automation for repetitive business tasks like sending out messages to colleagues. Other supported features include performance management, expense management, and onboarding automation. Sage HR does not offer payroll features, employee benefits, or compliance support.

Sage HR’s pricing starts at $5.50 per month per employee. Additional modules which come with their own respective features can be added for $3 extra. You can select and omit modules based on your company’s needs. Generally speaking, Sage HR is one of the more affordable solutions on the market today.

Overall, Sage HR is effective for hiring and onboarding employees but it does not offer the payroll features, benefits, or compliance assistance that alternatives do.

It is ideal for businesses who leverage HR software primarily for job postings and performance management. Businesses interested in automating repetitive tasks - such as messaging colleagues - or accessing top-level reports about their company will also find Sage HR beneficial.

Sage HR Pricing & Cost

Sage HR’s pricing starts at $5.50 per month per employee. Each additional module costs an extra $3, while hiring and recruitment features are an additional $200 per month.

Sage HR Features

Below, we'll discuss Sage HR’s key features. We include product screenshots to give you a sense of this solution’s interface and usability.

Recruiting

Sage HR includes a feature-rich set of tools that help with the recruiting process. You can post and manage your job listings as well as streamline employee onboarding and offboarding. This will be particularly useful for small businesses that are rapidly growing and hiring new employees.

Creating a job posting is a user-friendly process. An example is seen below.

Application forms created through Sage HR come pre-equipped with fields such as full name, email, and phone number. You can also create custom fields with either text or dropdown responses. Finally, you can request any number of files from candidates such as their CV or cover letter.

Once you’ve created your job posting, Sage HR generates a sharable link that you can post on your own website as well as various job posting sites. You cannot directly post to websites such as Indeed or LinkedIn from Sage HR. This is a hindrance to your workflow when compared to alternatives like BambooHR.

You can customize the pipeline your candidates go through during their interview process. An example is seen below.

Although you cannot edit the actual steps in a pipeline, you can change their order, make them optional, or disable them altogether. Once your candidates start going through your pipeline, you can use a customizable scorecard to track the following:

Scorecards are highly customizable. You can add an unlimited number of categories and subcategories to score.

Hiring and Onboarding

Sage HR allows you to automate onboarding and offboarding with tasks. An example of an onboarding task is seen below.

As you can see above, tasks can automatically send out documents to new hires or employees leaving your company. There are a number of custom fields such as employee names or positions that help personalize your tasks as well.

In addition to document sending, Sage HR can be used to manage other onboarding and offboarding tasks. These include:

Time Tracking

Sage HR’s time tracking tools are helpful for businesses with hourly employees. Employees can clock in and out and request time off. Managers can set paid-time-off (PTO) policies, monitor hours, approve timesheets, and approve time-off requests.

Note that employees currently cannot clock in and out through Sage HR’s mobile app. Instead, mobile users can clock in through their phone’s browser. Employees who need to clock in away from a computer, such as field service management workers, should take note of this.

You can create as many PTO policies as you require for your employees. Common policies include vacation days, sick days, and bereavement. You can customize the amount of time employees can take off, define PTO accrual methods, and select eligibility for certain employees.

Monitoring hours in Sage HR is easy to do. As you can see below, you have an overview of your employees’ clock-in times, break hours, and total hours. You can then approve timesheets from the same user interface.

Workflow Automation

Workflow automations are rules you can set to automate repetitive tasks for your company. Some examples in human resources software include reminding your team about monthly events or alerting your HR department of employee name changes.

Sage HR can automate your workflow through its "Recipes" feature. While these are effective, they are primarily built for automatically sending messages rather than carrying out actions within Sage HR.

Above is an example of a recipe in Sage HR. As you can see, automations are built with an "if-then" structure. For example, if it is the first day of the month, then an email will be sent to a team manager reminding them of the monthly company get together.

Recipes can be used for a multitude of different use cases. Some popular use cases include:

Expense Management

Sage HR allows you to track expenses made by your employees with its user-friendly expense management features. This means that tracking, approving, and reimbursing expenses for your employees is streamlined.

Employees can add expenses through the desktop and mobile app. Once you’ve submitted an expense, the administrators you’ve selected as a manager will be able to approve or deny accordingly.

As a manager, you can select any number of administrators, payment types, or expense categories. This level of flexibility means that you can easily track your company’s expenses, regardless of how specific they might be.

Sage HR comes with a number of premade expense categories including:

Performance Management

Sage HR’s performance management features help you track employee goals, performance reviews, and feedback. This means that your company can successfully leverage Sage HR to track performance and overall employee satisfaction.

Goals can be set personally, for your team, or for your entire company. As an administrator, you can choose to further customize goals for your company with the following settings:

You can also see overall summaries of your company’s goals in Sage HR’s reports module. We will discuss this more in the next section.

Above is an example of a 1-to-1 meeting dashboard in Sage HR. These are essentially reports that are customizable and oftentimes used for performance reviews. As you can see, the dashboard includes the manager and employee, a checklist of items they will go over in the review, any goals they’ve set, as well as meeting notes managers can edit.

Sage HR’s 1-to-1 dashboard is a very effective method of handling performance reviews. This is because it acts as a centralized hub where you can organize your employee’s past and future performance. Businesses with hundreds of employees will find this structure helpful, as they can easily navigate their entire company’s individual progress.

Finally, Sage HR allows you to create surveys to send out for employee satisfaction and insights. We generally found that this was Sage HR’s weakest performance management feature. Alternatives like Gusto provide a far more user-friendly experience in survey creation. Still, Sage HR’s surveys are highly customizable and its other performance management features are a worthy trade off.

Analytics and Reporting

Sage HR tracks a number of top-level company details through its analytics and reporting features. You have access to reports on your company’s performance, employee data, onboarding, timesheets, and expenses. This means that you can visualize important employee and company details very efficiently.

You cannot build custom reports in Sage HR, however.

Here is an overview of some of the most common reports your company might need:

Integrations

Integrations in Sage HR are primarily run through Zapier. Sage HR does not support a high number of native integrations. Regardless, here are some of Sage HR’s most popular integrations:

Customer Support

Sage HR’s customer support team is helpful and quick to respond. They are reachable through phone, email, and live chat. Responses through email usually take a few business days.

Sage HR does not come with as many secondary resources as alternatives like Gusto. Its main resource is its knowledge base. This is where users can gain tips on onboarding and how to use the platform itself.

Sage HR Alternatives & Competitors

Sage HR competes with a variety of human resources management solutions that offer similar functionality. The best choice for you will depend on your budget and feature preferences.

Sage HR's top competitors are:

Is Sage HR Right For You?

Overall, Sage HR is effective for hiring and onboarding employees but it does not offer the payroll features, benefits, or compliance assistance that alternatives do.

It is ideal for businesses who leverage HR software primarily for job postings and performance management. Businesses interested in automating repetitive tasks - such as messaging colleagues - or accessing top-level reports about their company will also find Sage HR beneficial.

If you're interested, you can try Sage HR today.