We build software for services businesses. We are also a services business. So every module we ship, we use ourselves first.
Our attendance is logged in Juntrax. Our leave requests get approved in Juntrax. Our timesheets, our client invoices, our vendor payments, our performance reviews, all of it runs on the same instance you would buy.
That means we find the friction before you do. When a leave policy is confusing, someone on our team complains in Slack that week. When an invoice screen makes you hunt for a number, our own finance person is the one hunting.
This is a tour of what running Juntrax actually looks like. You’ll see the real screens, what’s on them, and how a single hour someone logs on a Tuesday turns into money in the bank three weeks later.
First, How the Platform Is Laid Out
Juntrax runs on three role-based portals. The same data sits underneath, with a different view on top.
The employee portal is what most of our team sees: their own attendance, their own leave, their own timesheets, their own payslips, and their own tasks.
The manager portal adds the other side of every one of those, with approvals, payroll runs, performance cycles, workforce records, and the entire sales and purchasing side of the business.
The admin portal handles configuration: tax groups, leave programs, company entities, and permissions.
Moving between them means switching roles rather than switching products, and the sidebar changes with you.
One small thing matters more than it sounds: every screen has its own URL. Refresh the page, share a link in a message, or bookmark a report, and you land exactly where you were, with nothing resetting you to a home screen.
The top bar carries a global search that opens with a keyboard shortcut, and it behaves like a command palette. Start typing “leave balance” or “run payroll” and jump straight there. Next to it sit a notifications bell, an in-app help center with searchable articles, and a settings panel.
Part One: What Our Team Sees Every Day
The Dashboard Is a Triage Screen
We designed the dashboard around a simple question: what did this person most likely log in to do?
So it greets you by name and surfaces the one or two things waiting on you, whether that is a clock-in you have not done, a monthly timesheet still open, or a few reimbursements pending.
A Quick Links panel sits alongside it with the four things people do most: clock in, apply for leave, fill a timesheet, and open leave or timesheet history.
There is also a Celebrations panel that pulls birthdays and work anniversaries coming up in the next few days, with a filter to widen the window. It is a small feature, and our team uses it constantly.
Profile Has a Deliberate Speed Bump
Profile is the deepest module in the employee view. It splits into Overview, Personal, Professional, Employment, Shift, and Leaves tabs, so each category of record gets its own screen instead of one endless form.
Personal covers national IDs, addresses, contacts, dependents, bank accounts, and passport and visa records. Employment covers department, reporting manager, tenure, job title, shift assignment, and standard working hours.
Two decisions here are worth calling out.
Sensitive fields render masked. Date of birth and email show as placeholders rather than plain text, so if you screen-share in a client call or someone walks past your desk, those fields are not sitting there in the open.
You cannot edit identity data directly. You submit a Request Edit, and it routes to HR for approval before the record changes.
That second one annoys people the first time they hit it, and we kept it anyway. Bank account numbers and national IDs feed payroll and statutory filings, and a maker-checker step on those records is the difference between a clean audit and a bad month.
Attendance Lets People Fix Their Own Mistakes
The attendance screen centers on a circular clock-in and clock-out timer with live status and break tracking.
Below it, a weekly bar chart breaks worked and break hours out by weekday, and progress bars roll those up against monthly targets across three buckets: worked, break, and overtime.
A month-paginated History table shows every day with a status badge, and a Requests page lets an employee flag an incorrect entry and submit a correction.
That last screen quietly removes a whole category of month-end argument, because people check their own attendance before payroll closes instead of disputing a payslip after it lands.
Leave Shows the Math Behind the Number
Leave separates applying from tracking, because they are different jobs.
The Apply Leave form takes a date range, a leave type, an optional half-day flag, and a reason.
The part we lean on comes next. If your selected dates fall outside the plan’s notice window, the form flags it right there, with a message telling you the dates do not adhere to the notification period policy. You see the problem before your manager does, rather than after a rejection lands in your inbox.
History and Balance sit in separate views. Balance breaks entitlement down per plan into total, used, remaining, and expired, and each row opens into a log.
Because balances are computed against a real policy rather than a flat counter, you can see how many days you have left and how the system arrived at that number. Most of the back-and-forth leave generates is really an argument about that calculation, and showing the work ends the argument.
Timesheet Is Where HR Ends and Billing Begins
The timesheet renders as a full calendar grid rather than a table, with a toggle between pay-cycle view and month view.
Each day shows its fill status at a glance with a plain label: Not Filled, Day Off, or the hours logged. Weeks are labeled and grouped along the side, so jumping to a specific pay period does not mean scrolling the whole month. Past or locked cells carry a small lock icon marking the submission cutoff.
This is the module that separates a services-firm portal from a standard HR one.
The hours logged here are the raw material for billing, and they are also the raw material for utilization, the share of paid time that is billable to clients. That number has been under real pressure. According to SPI Research’s 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, billable utilization fell to 66.4% in 2025, a record low, and below the 70% floor the firm treats as healthy.
Utilization visibility starts with timesheets getting filled promptly and accurately. When the timesheet lives in the same portal people already open for leave and payslips, that happens far more reliably than when it sits in a separate tool with a separate login.
Those hours flow into project tracking and, through our professional services automation and Cash-Flow modules, straight into invoicing. We trace that path end to end further down.
Payroll Answers the Most Common HR Question
Payroll gives people self-service access to their payslips, filtered by financial year.
Columns run pay cycle, status, Gross Earning, Gross Deduction, Gross Tax, and Net Pay. Query outside a valid year range and you get a clear prompt rather than a blank screen.
It is a plain ledger, and that is the whole point. “Where is my payslip?” is the single most common request an HR team gets, and this screen answers it without an email.
Project Puts the Actual Work in the HR Portal
This is the module people are surprised to find here.
Each project carries a Summary tab with a health chart that segments planned hours into to-do, in-progress, completed, due, and delayed.
A Kanban board shows swimlane columns with live counts. Every card carries a task code, a color-coded priority, a date range, an avatar group for multiple assignees, and a comment count.
A Task Planning view groups tasks into named sets and surfaces an unallocated-hours counter. That counter is the capacity planning signal: estimated hours measured against who is free.
A Team roster lists members with a project role, active status, and audit fields recording who added them and when. Reports and configuration tabs appear for manager and admin roles only.
A personal My Tasks screen collects everything one person owns across every project they touch.
For a project-driven firm, this changes what logging in means. You open the portal to run your day, from the tasks you own to the hours you log to the projects you deliver.
See how your team’s timesheet and tasks run inside one portal
Reimbursement Runs as a Pipeline
We model expense claims as a status pipeline: new, pending, approved, rejected, and paid, with live counts on each state.
A reports view sits alongside, and column visibility and filters are separate controls, so you can reshape the view without touching the underlying data.
The result is that nobody has to ask whether an expense has been paid yet, because the claim’s position in the pipeline is the answer.
Performance Draws on Records People Already See
Performance manages review and appraisal cycles across Open, In Progress, and Closed stages, with a live count on each.
It pulls from attendance, leave, and payroll data, so a review is built on the same records the employee has been looking at all year, with no parallel spreadsheet and no surprise numbers in the review meeting.
Part Two: What Managers See
Everything above has a mirror on the manager side.
Leave approvals land in a queue. Each request opens with the employee’s details, the leave type, duration, applied-on date, and their full leave balance table right there in the same view. The same notice-period warning the employee saw is visible to the approver. You approve or reject with a comment, and it is done.
Payroll stops being a payslip list and becomes a Run Payroll workspace. You scope it by company entity and pay cycle, and requests move through Open, Approved, Processed, and Paid, with each stage carrying its own count.
Performance shifts from taking part in a review to building the cycle. You name it, set the date range, pick the entity, and assign employees. Cycles can be scoped to one legal entity or run cross-company, which matters if you operate in multiple countries on one instance. We run India, Netherlands, and USA entities on ours.
Workforce covers the employee record end to end, across Active, Onboard, Activate, Terminated, Transferred, and Future Action states, plus a bulk holiday calendar and the request queue where those profile-change requests land. From an employee’s profile you can send login credentials to a new hire, trigger a data change, or manage their employment.
The manager sidebar also opens up modules the employee view never shows: Organization Chart, Client and Vendor, Items and Services, Sales, Purchases, Assets, Config, and Reports.
That brings us to the part of the platform most HR tools do not have at all.
Part Three: The Money Side
This is where a lot of all-in-one platforms quietly stop. They handle people, and billing goes to a separate accounting tool, where someone spends the last three days of every month reconciling hours against invoices.
We run our own client billing and vendor payments inside Juntrax, as two mirrored flows.
Sales: From Client to Cash
Clients come first. A client record holds the ID, name, addresses, contacts by department, default taxes, terms and conditions, and a shipping address. Mark a client inactive and they stay on record but drop out of the dropdowns on new documents.
Proposals are optional. A proposal is an internal budget sign-off, useful when a manager needs a number approved before committing. You set a budget amount, pick an approver, and lay out two to five cost options, each showing profit as budget minus that option’s total. It moves through Open, Sent for Approval, Approved, or Rejected.
One thing to know: approving a proposal does not create a quote. Someone copies the approved numbers into a Quotation. We kept the approval and the commercial document separate on purpose, though it does mean a manual step.
Quotation is the real start of a sale, the priced quote you send the client. It carries services with name, hours, rate, discount, and tax, items with name, quantity, unit price, discount, and tax, plus dates, terms, and attachments. Subtotal, discount, tax, and grand total recalculate live as you edit lines.
You mark it as Sent, and when the client’s order arrives you convert it to a Received PO. Statuses run New, Email Sent, PO Received, Expired, and Cancelled.
Received PO is the hub. This is the client’s purchase order coming back to you, and it is where a sale gets tied to a Project.
Its Manage screen is the control center, with a summary on the left and money tiles on the right: order total, billed, received, remaining, pending, and overdue, with a progress bar. Two tabs sit underneath, Invoices and Receivables, where you raise bills and log payments against this specific order. Most fields lock once invoices exist against the order.
Invoice can be built four ways: from scratch, from a purchase order, from a quotation, or from billable time logged on a project. That fourth option is the one that matters, and we come back to it.
The list view shows invoice number, PO number, client, invoice date, due date, age in days, total, received, pending, status, approved, and sent. Actions include Mark as Approved, Mark as Sent, Record Payment, print in a compact or classic layout, email the invoice or a pro-forma, clone, or cancel.
Receivables record money in. Pick the invoice and it auto-fills client, currency, and amount, then you set the mode, whether cash, bank transfer, cheque, or card, and the amount. Logging one is what turns an invoice Paid.
Purchases: From Supplier to Payment
The purchasing side mirrors it.
Vendors carry more than clients do, with banking details, routing numbers, payment terms, business type, license, classification, and preferred payment method. Vendor IDs must be unique within a company.
Received Quotation is where buying starts. It is the supplier’s quote to you. Convert it to a PO and the quote gets marked PO Generated, so the same quote cannot be ordered twice.
One honest note: there is a Request for Quotation concept in the data model that never made it into the portal. There is no screen and no menu entry, so purchasing starts at Received Quotation. If we add it, it will slot in just before.
Purchase Order is your formal order to the supplier, tied to a project like the sales side. It tracks how much has been booked against it and how much is left.
Expense is a cost booked against a purchase order, and it sits between the order and the payment. The form covers dates, billing cycle, the purchase order, the associated project and employee, billable and approved toggles, vendor details, line items, and totals.
Payments close it out. Pick the expense, it auto-fills the vendor and amount, and you set the mode and value.
Four Rules the Screens Enforce
These are the guardrails, and they are worth knowing before you start.
An invoice can never exceed its order’s remaining balance, and the same holds on the purchasing side, where an expense cannot exceed its purchase order’s remaining balance.
A payment can never exceed what is still outstanding, and the form shows Pending and Remaining as you type.
You cancel from the bottom up. A payment blocks its invoice from being cancelled, an invoice blocks its order, and an order blocks its quote, so you undo the most recent step first.
Statuses set themselves. You never mark something Overdue or Paid by hand, since an invoice turns Overdue the day after its due date and Paid once nothing is pending.
One more rule holds across every form: fields stay locked until you pick a Company at the top, and that is also the moment the document number gets generated.
Prices Freeze When You Bill
Three behaviors around pricing save arguments later.
Frozen at billing: The moment you raise an invoice, its prices and costs lock, so if you change a catalogue price next month, this invoice, and the profit calculated on it, stay exactly as billed.
Documents are independent: Editing a catalogue item never rewrites a quote or invoice you already sent, because each document keeps its own copy of what it was built from.
Rates are time-aware: A person’s billing rate changes over time, and we always apply the rate that was in effect on the day the work was logged, not today’s rate.
That last one sounds like a technicality until you give someone a mid-year raise and then have to bill a client for work they did in March.
How an Hour Becomes Money
Everything above is modules. This is the thread that runs through all of them.
A senior engineer opens the employee portal on a Tuesday morning. She clocks in, opens her timesheet calendar, finds Tuesday, logs six hours against the Apollo Redesign project, and marks them billable. That is the last time a human touches those hours.
The hours land on the project, so Apollo Redesign’s used-hours count moves. If the project is running against 320 estimated hours, the gap between estimated and used narrows, and that shows up on the project’s health chart.
The rate attaches automatically, and it is the rate that was in effect on that Tuesday, not today’s rate.
Someone raises an invoice from the project. Instead of building lines by hand, they pick the project and the billable time drops in as service lines, priced as hours times each person’s rate, per line, with tax applied per line.
The order checks the amount. The invoice is booked against the Received PO for Apollo, and if the amount exceeds what is left on that order, the system stops you and shows the remaining balance.
The invoice ages on its own, moving from New to Due, then to Overdue the day after the due date if nothing arrives.
A receivable closes it. Finance logs the payment, Pending drops, Received climbs, and once nothing is outstanding the invoice flips to Paid without anyone setting it.
The order summary updates, recalculating order total, billed, received, remaining, pending, and overdue, with the progress bar showing what has been collected, what is billed but unpaid, and what has not been billed yet.
There is no export, no reconciliation spreadsheet, and no copy-paste between an HR tool and an accounting tool.
Where Hours and Money Meet
Worth being precise about something, because it is a common misunderstanding.
Hours and money are tracked independently. Hours come from timesheets, and money comes from orders, invoices, and payments, so they are separate ledgers.
The one place they sit side by side is the Project Billing report, one row per project, with estimated hours, used hours, order total, billed, received, remaining, and due.
The report does not merge them. It lines them up, which is what you want when you are asking whether a project is profitable. Comparing 164 hours used against 42,000 billed and 28,000 received tells you something no single combined number would.
Who This Fits
We built this shape for a specific kind of company: the ones where the same people carry billable work and internal admin.
Consulting and IT services firms: A consultant tracks a client matter, logs billable hours against it, checks a leave balance, and downloads a payslip without switching tabs. The client’s PO, the project, the timesheet, and the invoice are one chain.
Architecture and engineering firms: Project phases run long and billing runs against milestones. Field engineers log hours from a phone, the project health chart shows planned versus delayed hours, and the Received PO screen shows exactly how much of the contract value is left to bill.
Law firms: Billing is matter-based, with rates that vary by seniority. The time-aware rate handling matters here more than anywhere, since you bill March’s work at March’s rate even after a partner-track change in June.
Staffing and recruitment agencies: High headcount churn gives the Workforce states real weight, from Onboard and Activate to Transferred, Terminated, and Future Action. Contractor hours flow into client invoices, and vendor payments flow out through the purchasing side.
Creative and marketing agencies: The work is retainers plus project delivery. Proposals handle internal budget sign-off before a quote goes out, and the Kanban board runs delivery.
Multi-entity businesses: If you run legal entities in more than one country, payroll scopes per entity, performance cycles can run cross-company, and each document is stamped with its company. We run three entities on ours.
What We Kept Doing Differently
Most employee self-service portals stop at the HR boundary. They handle attendance, leave, payslips, and personal data well, and they hand project work to a different tool.
That split costs you twice, because employees keep two systems open and finance reconciles hours between them every month.
We put project delivery, HR administration, and billing on one surface. An engineer logs field hours against a project phase in the same session she reviews her attendance. A consultant moves a task across a board and pulls a payslip from the same sidebar. Finance raises an invoice from that consultant’s logged hours without exporting anything.
The role structure keeps that from becoming a mess. Employees see their own records, managers see approvals, capacity, and the commercial side, and admins configure. Sensitive identity data stays masked and moves through request-to-edit regardless of who is looking at it.
That is the design: HRMS, PSA, and Cash-Flow feeding the same records instead of competing for them.
Try It the Way We Use It
The honest test of a platform like this is simple. Can one person log an hour, one manager approve it, and one finance person bill it, without anyone opening a spreadsheet? That is the test we run on ourselves every month.
Spend a few minutes inside it and run the same test. You can compare plans on our pricing page, or read our HRMS guide and timesheet management guide for the wider context.
Explore the employee self-service portal for your own team
Frequently Asked Questions
What Can Employees Do in the Juntrax Portal?
Employees can clock in and out, track breaks, and correct attendance errors; apply for leave and check balances by plan; fill and submit timesheets against projects; download payslips by financial year; submit and track reimbursement claims; view the projects and tasks they are staffed on; take part in performance reviews; and update personal details through an approval-backed request.
Does the Employee Self-Service Portal Work on Any Device?
The portal is web-based and addressable at each screen’s own URL, so employees can open it in a browser on a laptop or a phone. The settings panel also exposes display controls, including light and dark modes, compact density, right-to-left layout, and font choices, so people can tune the interface to how and where they work.
How Is Employee Data Kept Secure in the Portal?
Sensitive fields such as date of birth and email are masked rather than shown in plain text, and changes to identity data go through a Request Edit approval flow rather than direct edits. Access is role-based, so employees, managers, and admins each see only the data and actions their role allows.
Is the Employee Portal the Same as the Manager and Admin Portals?
No. Juntrax provides three role-based portals. The employee portal focuses on an individual’s own records, tasks, and requests. The manager portal adds approvals, resource allocation, and team capacity. The admin portal handles configuration and system-wide settings. They share the same data, presented according to permission level.
Can an Employee Self-Service Portal Handle Project Timesheets?
Most cannot without a separate tool. The Juntrax portal includes timesheets, task boards, and project views alongside standard HR functions, so employees log billable hours and manage tasks in the same place they handle leave and payslips.