We studied how KEDO (personnel electronic document management) works in Bitrix24
And we tell you to save your time
To climb over this tall fence of understanding how EDC in Bitrix24 actually works now, we:
Watched 384 minutes of video lessons and videos
Read 23 articles and publications
6 times we started correspondence with those. support with information that our turn for an answer was 120 or higher, and in the end we waited for an answer
At least 7 developers were tormented with questions
And in the end, we finally understood how it works, what can be implemented and what is still missing. We’ll tell you in this article so that you don’t have to go through all these paths.
For information: we are a company that implements and configures Bitrix24, 1C and their integration. If you want to know “can B24 do something like this…” or “we want it to be like this in Bitrix…” – write to us, we will connect!
I'll start with some background information: what is KEDO?
HR electronic document management is the creation, signing, use and storage of work-related documents in electronic form without duplicating them on paper. Each employee working in the company signs a large number of personnel documents. It feels like there are more and more of these documents every year. Personnel documents begin with hiring, vacations, and end with familiarization with various orders. That is, personnel documents exist in every company that has at least 1 employee.
What does HR document flow look like on paper in organizations?
An HR department employee generates documents for employees, prints them, invites employees to sign, collects signatures, signs them from the head of the company, and transfers them to the archive.
And this is a simple path diagram, for example, for a business trip order or a power of attorney, and the employees are in the same office.
If the document must be signed in 2 copies, one remains with the employee, the second with the employer, and the employee and the HR department are located in different offices or even cities, the scheme will look much more complicated:
The HR department employee prints the employment contract in 2 copies and sends it by courier to the employee. The employee receives, signs, and sends back two copies. Next, the HR employee signs employment contracts with the head of the company, puts a stamp, and sends one copy to the employee by courier service, and the second to the archive. This may take a month.
Services for KEDO
There are now a large number of services on the market that help companies move from paper documents to electronic ones, here are some of them:
Circuit
1C
Bitrix24
and others…
What does KEDO look like in B24?
Bitrix24 has a number of advantages and a number of disadvantages. On the one hand, a lot has been done to simplify the work, on the other hand there are shortcomings.
So, first you need to upload a document that will be sent for signature. It’s immediately convenient that documents can be in different formats.
Next, you need to select the document code, this is a mandatory step when working with KEDO and it is already included in the list:
And then the quest begins with the participants in the process, since the participation of several people is necessary.
Company – everything is clear here, choose your organization
Provider – we will always choose Gosklyuch.
The person signing on behalf of the company is an employee who has a Enhanced Qualified Electronic Signature (the one that looks like a flash drive), this is the head of the company or the one to whom a power of attorney and a duplicate signature were given.
Approval – a specialist who will receive the document for approval. For example, the document must be approved by the head of the HR department. You don't have to choose
Who will fill it out is the contractor who will check whether all the employee data that may be required is in the system. If the document is uploaded completely completed, then this role is not needed. If the document was uploaded as a template for Bitrix24 to fill in the employee’s personal data (position, personal data, etc.), this person will check that all the data is entered in the employee’s card or enter them manually. You don't have to choose.
The next stage is choosing an employee to whom this document will be sent for signature. What we are faced with here is that we need to add employees one by one and manually. If we direct it to 1-2 employees, there are no problems (we are a small company, everyone knows each other, there is no need to check the staffing table). And if we send a document for 10-20-40 employees, then it becomes very difficult to add all employees in turn, check the staffing table, and the relevance of the data. “Quest” is putting it mildly
We send the document for approval, signing by the manager and then it is sent to the employee for signing. Employees have exactly one day to review and sign the document. Why only 1 day? Is it possible for 2 days?
If the employee does not have time to sign, the document is deleted and he will need to go through all the stages of creating the document again and have the manager sign it. It’s not entirely convenient that such a short period of time.
What is made of automation?
You can download a document template and select fields that CRM will fill in for a large number of employees.
For example, an introduction sheet can be sent to 20 people, Bitrix itself can insert employee data from the card, and the HR department employee does not need to manually fill out a sheet for 20 people. Fine? Yes!
Comfortable? Not yet 🙂
The screenshot shows that you need to get the hang of it and get used to inserting the fields correctly into the document so that there are not too large gaps between Last Name First Name Patronymic, and the fields do not move down in level.
Signature by employee
Bitrix24 will send a notification about the receipt of the document for signing. Next, the employee goes to the Gosklyuch mobile phone application and signs. We will not describe it step by step, since this is already in a large number of guides and the procedure is standard. Let's just say that the process here is very quick and simple.
Signed documents
All signed documents will be stored in the Bitrix24 cloud. But when an organization switches to KEDO, it is necessary to immediately decide where the archive will additionally be stored in the organization. All services (or the main part) immediately warn that all documents will be stored as long as the system is in use. Certain personnel records must be archived for 50 and 75 years. Since there is a high probability of a system change during such a period, you need to immediately determine which archive you will maintain.
In Bitrix24, a signed document can be saved as an archive, which will consist of the following documents:
Everything here is also in accordance with the law, there is a document wredc_data.xml
In what case can such a system work?
We are a small organization and have employees who work in other cities. We have been using Bitrix24 for a couple of years now. And it was really easy for us to launch KEDO, since everyone was used to the program, the start was simple, a large number of settings were not needed, the employees quickly installed the State Key applications and figured out the signature. Remote employees no longer come to the office to sign documents, sometimes we lost 2 hours of working time due to documents, and we no longer spend money on signing documents with employees from other cities (an average of 500 rubles per document), time for courier service and long wait for documents.
Therefore, purely from mathematics, we spent 0 rubles on the implementation of EDC in our company, and even saved several thousand on document delivery (they never told me exactly how much).
Now let's go over the disadvantages
It seemed to us that for large organizations they are very significant.
Firstly, there is no way to customize business processes. We have group leaders with whom their subordinates must first coordinate vacations. We wanted to set up automatic selection of a direct manager, so that employees wouldn’t accidentally mess up, and managers wouldn’t accidentally approve other people’s vacations.
The second big problem is that there is no connection with accounting. To calculate vacation, personnel “manually” inform the accounting department. There is not even an option to check a box that requires an accounting employee to be informed about this document, not to mention full integration with the calculation.
Number three: you can’t customize templates so employees have forms at their fingertips. There is only a field where the most recently used documents are displayed in chronological order. This does not solve the problem of accessibility of applications and ease of submission, which is the majority of personnel documents. The story that an employee pulls 5 people in search of applications and distracts the personnel officer continues to live.
Conclusion (purely ours and purely based on our experience)
KEDO in B24 looks like a preparation for something more… It’s hard to think of what it could be used for in the form it is implemented now, if only for collecting employee signatures. The bulk of the work of drafting documents and informing other departments remains unchanged. But in cases where you have several departments or employees remotely, yes, you can safely try.
Taking Bitrix just for the sake of KEDO doesn’t seem like a great idea financially, because this function is now available starting from the Pro tariff. KEDO can be launched if you already use it for other tasks.
For large companies where it is necessary to automate processes, systems are needed that automatically draw up documents, calculate salaries, check the duration of vacations, and here it is better to look towards other systems. For comparison, we studied these processes in 1C and will write a separate article about it.
