Luna HR Docs

Onboarding

Getting started with Luna HR takes just a few minutes. This guide walks you through the initial setup process.

Creating your account

When you first sign up for Luna HR, you'll be asked to create your account using your email address. Luna HR uses secure authentication — there are no passwords to remember.

Once signed in, the setup wizard will guide you through configuring your company.

The setup wizard

The setup wizard has a few key steps:

1. Company details

Enter your company name, registered address, and other basic information. This is used across Luna HR for things like payslips, reports, and your public job board.

2. Choose your modules

Luna HR is modular — you select which features you need. All modules are included during your trial, so you can explore everything before deciding. You can change your module selection at any time from Admin > Modules.

Available modules include Leave, Expenses, Training, Security Awareness, Performance, Wellness, Assets, Recruitment, and more.

3. Set up your org structure

Create your company's hierarchy. This can be as simple or as detailed as you need:

  • Company (top level)
    • Region (e.g. UK, Europe)
      • Office (e.g. London, Manchester)
        • Department (e.g. Engineering, Sales)
          • Team (e.g. Frontend, Backend)

Your org structure is flexible — you can add, rename, or reorganise at any time. See Company Structure for more details.

4. Invite your team

Add employees individually or use the bulk invite feature to send onboarding invitations to your whole team at once.

Each new hire receives a personalised onboarding link. The wizard shows these slides, in this order — the template decides which of the optional ones appear:

  1. Welcome — your welcome title and message. Always shown
  2. Your role — job title, department, team, start date and working pattern, read from their employee record. Optional
  3. Key people — their line manager plus any contacts you add to the template. Optional
  4. Meet your team — everyone else in their primary team, line manager first. Optional; skipped when they have no teammates yet
  5. Your office — address, access hours, parking and transport from their office in your org structure. Optional; skipped when that office has no details filled in
  6. Tips — the tip cards you write. Optional
  7. Your first week — the template's checklist, read-only. Shown whenever the checklist has at least one item
  8. Your details — the personal fields you choose (see the Personal fields tab below). Always shown
  9. Emergency contact — name, relationship and phone. Optional
  10. Transport — how they'll commute, parking, and vehicle or cycle details. Optional
  11. Documents — the files you ask them to upload. Shown whenever the template asks for at least one
  12. Your policies — their leave allowance and upcoming public holidays, expense categories and mandatory training, for the modules you use. Optional; skipped when there's nothing to show
  13. Starter pack — company documents an admin has added with Add to starter pack in the Filing Cabinet (the document's ⋯ menu), to open or download. Shown only when there is at least one; nothing is acknowledged or signed here. Only company documents can go in — not one filed against an employee — and only an admin can add them
  14. Complete — submits everything and asks them to create their Luna HR login

The onboarding wizard is token-based — new hires don't need a Luna HR account to complete it.

Admin: onboarding templates

Admins can customise the onboarding experience from Admin > Onboarding:

Template builder

Create reusable onboarding templates. Each template has these tabs:

  • Welcome — the welcome title and message on the first slide, plus an internal note only admins see
  • Slides — switch the optional slides on or off, add key people (pick an employee, or type a name, job title and email for someone who isn't in Luna) and write tips (a title, text and an optional category each)
  • Checklist — a "Your first week" list of things the new hire will do once they start (collect a laptop, meet their manager, sign the confidentiality agreement). It appears as a read-only slide after the tips whenever the template has at least one item; nothing is ticked off in the wizard
  • Documents — required documents the new hire uploads (each can be required or optional, limited to certain file types, and allow several files — a driving licence front and back, say), and required signatures: Filing Cabinet documents they're asked to sign. The wizard won't finish while a required upload is missing
  • Personal fields — which groups the Your details slide asks for: name (always), contact details, identity (date of birth and nationality), home address, equality and diversity, dietary requirements, and transport. New templates start with name, contact details and identity
  • Auto-assign — training courses, security awareness courses and asset categories to set up when the new hire finishes (see When the new hire finishes below)

Job title, department, team and line manager are never set in a template — the wizard reads them from the employee's own record.

Text fields have sensible limits: names and titles up to 200 characters, descriptions, messages and tips up to 2,000, and a key person's email must be a real email address.

Managing invites

The admin onboarding page also shows:

  • Invited employees — who has been sent an onboarding link and their completion status
  • Resend / revoke — resend the invite email, or revoke a pending or in-progress invite. Revoking makes the link stop working immediately and discards anything the new hire had uploaded; their employee record is untouched and you can send a fresh invite later. Completed invites can't be revoked
  • Bulk invite — send onboarding invitations to multiple new hires via CSV upload (see below)
  • Preview — see exactly what the new hire will experience before sending the invitation

Bulk CSV invite

The bulk invite tool lets you invite many new hires at once using a CSV file. It follows the same quality standards as the data import wizard:

  1. Upload your CSV — drag and drop or click to browse
  2. Map columns — Luna HR auto-detects common headers. You can manually adjust mappings for any columns that weren't matched
  3. Preview and validate — review each row with inline error/warning indicators. Edit cells directly in the table to fix issues without re-uploading
  4. Import — creates employee stubs and sends onboarding invite emails

Supported fields:

| Field | Required | Notes | |-------|----------|-------| | First name | Yes | | | Last name | Yes | | | Email | Yes | Must be unique. Stored lower-cased — this is the address the new hire signs in with | | Template | Yes | Must match an active onboarding template name | | Start date | No | YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY | | Job title | No | A display label only. It never grants a permission role — every imported employee gets your default (non-admin) role, and roles are assigned separately | | Department | No | Must match an existing org node name. An unmatched name is a warning — the row imports without a department | | Line manager | No | Match by email or full name | | Employment type | No | full-time, part-time, contractor, intern (common spellings such as "Full time" or "Freelance" are recognised). Anything else is an error on that row rather than a guess | | FTE | No | A number above 0 and up to 1 (1 = full time). Left blank, the employee is created at 1 | | Employee number | No | Up to 20 characters. Auto-generated (EMP-NNN) if not provided. Supplying your own doesn't consume a number from the auto sequence |

Every imported employee starts on a permanent contract — the CSV has no contract-type column, so change it on their profile if they're fixed-term or casual. One import can hold up to 500 rows; split a bigger file.

The preview step validates templates, departments, and managers against your existing data, and highlights any issues before you import. Two columns can't be mapped to the same field — only one would be imported, so the tool blocks until you skip the extras.

How invites work

When you create an onboarding instance, Luna HR:

  1. Generates a unique, secure token for the new hire
  2. Sends an invitation email with the onboarding link (unless the Onboarding invite email is switched off under Admin > Email templates — then copy the link from the invites list and send it yourself)
  3. The new hire clicks the link and completes the wizard at their own pace — answers are saved as they go, and the same link reopens where they left off until they finish or it expires (30 days)
  4. The invites list shows each invite's status — pending, in progress, completed or expired — with its expiry date. It doesn't show which slide someone has reached
  5. On completion, their employee record is updated with the information they provided, and the link stops working

Sending a new invite to someone who already has one replaces it — the old link stops working. Resend uses the same email template and wording as the first send, and is refused while that email is switched off. It also restarts the link's 30 days, so a resent invite — even one whose link had already lapsed — works for the full 30 days the email promises. Resend is refused for someone who has since been suspended, set inactive, or started leaving.

When the new hire finishes

Completing the wizard:

  • Updates their employee record with what they entered — name, contact details, date of birth, address, equality and dietary answers, commute preferences and their profile photo — and saves their emergency contact and any vehicle they gave
  • Files every upload in the Filing Cabinet against their profile, tagged onboarding
  • Creates a signature request for each required signature and emails it to them (unless the Signature request email is switched off). Because they have no login yet, the email links to sign-up with their work address filled in; the document is waiting in their Filing Cabinet once they're in
  • Enrols them on the next scheduled session of each auto-assigned training course — or, when none is scheduled, tells everyone who approves training that they need one
  • Assigns each auto-assigned security awareness course
  • Tells everyone who manages assets which equipment categories they need
  • Emails and notifies their line manager, and notifies your admins in the app

It does not make them an active employee on its own. The last slide asks them to create their Luna HR login with their work email; signing up links that login to their record. Nobody is sent separate login details. If they still haven't signed up about a day after finishing, Luna emails them one reminder with a sign-up link — that's the Login invite email under Admin > Email templates, so switching it off stops the reminder too.

Email addresses are the link to a login. Luna matches the address on the employee record against the verified address on the account the new hire creates, so it stores every address lower-cased and compares them that way. Casing in your CSV or in the Add Employee form makes no difference.

Employees who have left (leaver, terminated, or archived) or been parked (inactive, suspended) can't be sent a login invite or an onboarding invite — whether from the invite dialog, the Needs Invite tab or the Add Employee form. Reactivate them first if that's genuinely what you want.

Next steps

Once your company is set up: