BambooHR, a popular Human Capital Management (HCM) system, is widely used for its relatively low cost, user-friendly interface, and solid HCM features. BambooHR is designed to streamline multiple HCM-related tasks such as:

• Employee data management, including employee self-service
• Hiring
• Employee onboarding & offboarding
• Paid Time Off (“PTO”) Tracking
• Employee Reporting & Analytics including Regulatory Reporting

BambooHR has become a favored choice among firms with 150 employees or less, given its intuitive design, which requires limited technical expertise. However, BambooHR has certain limitations that organizations must consider before purchasing or implementing. One key consideration is that as your company grows, its requirements and complexities often grow as well. BambooHR’s limitations may impact your HR operations’ efficiency and effectiveness in this scenario.

At its core, BambooHR can provide small firms, including alternative asset managers, with a very good and efficient HCM system. The key to a successful BambooHR implementation is to ensure that you adapt your HCM processes to how BambooHR is set up and avoid a very bespoke set of processes that doesn’t align with BambooHR’s setup. In our experience, as explained in this document’s key limitations section, this will lead to several manual workarounds and frustrations for your HR and Management Teams.

Some main areas of BambooHR that you want to keep in line with include:

1. Job Table / Job History – This is the core way that BambooHR tracks an employee’s job status and position history at your company, including job titles and reporting relationships and compensation history.
2. Hiring – This module includes managing open positions and linking candidates to those positions to manage them through the Recruiting lifecycle.
3. Emergency Contacts – This is its own tab in BambooHR that tracks an employee’s emergency contacts.
4. Document Management – This tab tracks documents related to your employees, including BambooHR’s useful signed document workflow.
5. Training – This area focuses on tracking required training for employees as well as optional training and employee certifications.

Key Limitations of BambooHR

The following section outlines the main issues our clients have experienced during their BambooHR implementations when creating bespoke and custom processes from their HCM team in BambooHR. Clients with well-established HR processes do not want to significantly alter those processes or the organization of fields to align with BambooHR’s setup.

Despite these limitations, FinServ believes that BambooHR is a very good and cost-effective HCM solution for most smaller firms. We offer this article to ensure that all potential BambooHR customers come into their selection or implementation of BambooHR with as much prior knowledge as possible.

It is important to note that some of these limitations are broader, including limited custom reporting and hardcoded areas of the application, which most companies will consider an issue with BambooHR’s overall architecture and setup.

Limited Custom Reporting Capabilities

BambooHR’s simplicity benefits small to mid-sized firms looking for a user-friendly solution. This is especially true if your HR team currently maintains data in Excel. BambooHR provides a simple route to upgrade to a system with proper auditing, workflow, and security capabilities.

One of BambooHR’s main limitations is its inability to support complicated reporting requirements. For example, many clients in the Alternative Asset Management industry create Due Diligence Questionnaire (“DDQ”) reports as part of their standard reporting. These reports contain certain key calculations, like the tenure of an employee working in the Private Equity or Hedge Fund industry. However, BambooHR cannot automate this calculation, and other calculated fields related to these items could not be seamlessly pulled into reports for one of our recent clients. While we were able to work with BambooHR to come up with a workaround solution, some clients may consider these limitations too restrictive to their core requirements and may desire an HCM system with more robust reporting capabilities.

BambooHR’s formula fields cannot handle complex calculations, including If/Then statements, currency conversions, or calculations with multiple variables (AND/OR). While FinServ typically finds workarounds for these issues, the final solutions can require manual intervention, adding a layer of manual work and time to key processes.

Furthermore, customizing reports or conducting advanced data analysis in BambooHR often requires exporting data to external tools like Excel. This, too, adds a layer of manual work and can lead to data integrity issues if not handled carefully. The lack of automation to produce seamless reporting can hinder HCM teams from gaining valuable insights and making timely data-driven decisions.

Finally, BambooHR has limited ability to share reports with external parties like an outsourced IT provider. In the Alternative Asset Management industry, firms frequently rely on outsourced IT providers to perform different HCM-related functions. Recently, one of our clients wanted an automated process to share two reports (New Hire Report and Termination Report) with their IT provider, who is responsible for setting up the applications for new hires and disabling access for the terminated employees. However, BambooHR could not share the reports with the third party directly, and the IT department had to be added as a user in the system. Even then, the IT provider could not directly view the data in the report and instead had to click a link in the report and sign in to the system to access the employee’s detailed data. Given BambooHR’s limited capabilities in this area, the client decided to export the report to Excel and then email the data to the outsourced IT provider, a sub-optimal solution.

Hiring Module Limitations

While BambooHR’s basic functionality of maintaining job records, adding, tracking, and assessing candidates is intuitive enough, many fields associated with these processes are hard coded. Therefore, there are no options to add or remove ‘standard’ fields, update field values, change field types, or customize the standard fields in any way.

For example, during a recent implementation, our client did not want to place their job postings on any job boards through BambooHR. However, BambooHR could not accommodate new hire-related capabilities, such as sending the new hire welcome package, etc., unless a job posting was created specifically in BambooHR. Additionally, once the job was created, BambooHR would automatically post it to the job boards, compromising our client’s desired job posting confidentiality. FinServ was able to design the system to allow Job postings to be created, but they would remain in the ‘Draft’ state in BambooHR. This would allow BambooHR to register the new hire associated with the job opening and set off the new hire processes without posting the job on the job boards.

That said, the requirement to limit job postings to a job board may be unique to this client, and most companies would likely want the functionality to post jobs to job boards. So, in this case, BambooHR’s functionality aligns with how most companies and FinServ clients want to manage their hiring. 

Limited Customization Ability / Hard Coded Tables, Tabs, and Widgets

BambooHR does support the creation of custom Tabs, Tables and Fields. However they also have some core Tabs, Tables and Fields that cannot be altered in any way in the system.

Customization can be crucial for tailoring an HCM system to fit an organization’s unique processes. BambooHR’s Job tab has the following standard tables: Employment Status, Job Information, and Compensation tables. These standard tables cannot be altered in any way, i.e., custom fields cannot be added, and existing fields cannot be customized (renaming the fields, hiding them from view, changing field format, etc.)

This is problematic because compensation and job information can be very specialized for many clients in the Alternative Asset Management and other industries. For our recent Private Equity client, the only solution was to create an entirely new custom Tab to house the custom tables and fields where they could create their own tailored version of Compensation, Job History, and Employment Status data.

The issue is compounded by the fact that using custom tables, many BambooHR’s core reporting capabilities are no longer available. For example, BambooHR email alerts and notifications, especially for Onboarding and Offboarding, pull data only from their standard Tabs and Tables. Storing data in custom Tables renders the built-in email alerts useless.

As a result, when setting up custom compensation, our client had to provide double entries of all Job data to comply with BambooHR’s standard tables to allow some core functionality in the system to be leveraged.

Another example was when a client wanted to leverage automation between BambooHR and ADP Payroll, the largest Payroll provider in the world. Limitations in standard workflow led our client to choose to leverage the Flexspring API.  Flexspring is a BambooHR partner firm that provides solutions to automate the setup of new hires and terminations from BambooHR to ADP Payroll and also automates the update of Employee Self Service changes from BambooHR to ADP, including address changes and other updates to the data.

Lastly, from a design perspective, BambooHR’s home page widgets are difficult to customize. These widgets, while useful and aesthetically pleasing, are hard coded and, as a result, cannot be modified. Some of these limitations include:

• Inability to add and create new widgets based on a client’s specific data
• Inability to resize the important widgets and/or minimize others
• Inability to set default widgets for certain access levels and job roles

Once again, many of these widgets pull data only from pre-set, standard tabs and tables; therefore, they cannot pull data from any custom tabs or tables.

Rigid Project Implementation Process

The implementation phase is critical for the successful adoption of any HCM system. While BambooHR provides knowledgeable and responsive implementation project managers, the implementation methodology used by these project managers consists of a “checklist” of tasks in a project plan, with limited flexibility to accommodate other requirements or hiccups. Furthermore, project managers are only available during a pre-defined period of four to six weeks and cannot provide any assistance for the implementation beyond that timeline. Hence, FinServ strongly urges BambooHR customers to complete the data mapping process internally and be clear on their set-up requirements before engaging with the implementation manager. Once the implementation is officially kicked off, there is a very limited window of four to six weeks to complete every single aspect of the system configuration.

Due to the familiarity with BambooHR implementations, FinServ has a well-defined set of systems integration processes that allows clients to define their requirements ahead of time. FinServ then creates a comprehensive Requirements and Design document, which is provided to the BambooHR implementation manager at the onset of the implementation. However, despite stringent advanced preparations, six weeks is typically insufficient for a comprehensive setup and system review. Beyond the six weeks, BambooHR will offer to extend work with their team but at a very high hourly rate, which can cause the relatively inexpensive implementation to cost three to four times more.

For firms used to white-glove services like FinServ’s clients in the Hedge Funds and Private Equity industry, BambooHR’s implementation methodology can be very frustrating. This can result in a prolonged setup time, a steeper learning curve, and increased costs and frustration for HCM teams. We recommend you hire a firm like FinServ to manage your implementation and ensure you get the service and support you require.

Conclusion

As noted at the start of this article, despite its limitations, FinServ believes that BambooHR is a very good and cost-effective HCM solution for most smaller companies with limited HR complexities who are willing to adapt their HR processes to BambooHR’s standard setup.

We suggest that firms be prepared to create additional reporting processes outside of BambooHR. If there is an advanced IT department, they can leverage the BambooHR API to extract data from the system for more sophisticated reporting.  The API also helps to support custom fields and tables in a more automated way.

If you do not have a strong IT department, hiring a consultant like FinServ to create these interfaces would be a worthwhile investment. In addition, if your team lacks the time or capabilities around project management, requirements gathering and documentation, FinServ can take on these tasks to oversee and manage your BambooHR implementation. While this has an upfront additional cost, the savings will be quickly realized by an efficient and complete implementation without having to delay the implementation and incur extra costs from BambooHR.

Finally, if you are a larger firm with a global footprint, we suggest a comprehensive vendor selection process that includes more robust HCM applications like Workday. FinServ has experience with the majority of HCM vendors in the marketplace and has a robust methodology to support vendor selections based on unique requirements.

How FinServ Can Help

With nearly 20 years of experience working with companies across the Financial Services industry, FinServ understands the nuanced HR requirements of most firms. Our consultants have the technical skills and industry expertise to design and implement effective HCM systems, bridging the gap between your firm and the software vendor. We ensure your specific data and workflow requirements are met, providing customized solutions that align with your business needs.