Personal Files: Individual HR Documents

Some HR documents are the same for everyone, a policy, a code of conduct, a safety induction. Others aren't. An employment contract has specific terms for that person. A disciplinary letter references a specific incident. A performance review is about one employee's year, not the whole team's. Until now, documents like these had to happen outside Microkeper, drafted elsewhere, emailed, signed on paper, and filed somewhere separate from the rest of the employee's record.

Personal Files changes that. It's a new way to create, issue, and manage documents that are unique to an individual employee, built directly into their profile, with the same visibility, tracking, and sign-off you already get from Skills and Files.

How is this different to Skills and Files?

Skills and Files, part of Microkeeper's online skills tracking, is built for one-to-many: the same policy or assessment gets issued to a group of employees, and you track completion across the team. Personal Files is built for one-to-one: a document that belongs to a single employee, with content that's specific to them.

The rule of thumb is simple. If the same document goes out to multiple employees and only the personal details change, or employees need to upload something themselves, Skills is still the right tool. If the document itself is genuinely individual, a contract, a disciplinary letter, an incident report, a one-off agreement, that's what Personal Files is for.

What can you actually do with it?

At the core of Personal Files is templates. Rather than drafting a contract or a letter from scratch every time, you build the template once, with the standard wording, formatting, and structure your business needs, and personalise it per employee using profile variables like first name, last name, email, position, and start date, plus any custom fields you've already set up.
Fill in the variables, issue it, and the document is generated for that person without retyping the parts that don't change.

Each file gets an action type, which determines how the employee needs to engage with it:

• Reference only: the employee can view the document, no action required.
• Sight and sign: the employee has to view it and provide a digital signature.
• Critical: signature is required before the employee can clock on, for documents you can't afford to have outstanding.
• Admin only: visible only to HR, not the employee, for internal-facing records.

Templates can sit in Draft while you're still working on them, move to Published when they're ready to issue, or be Archived once they're no longer in use. And once a document has been signed, its content is locked, HR can still update its category or status, but the signed record itself can't be edited, which matters if that document ever needs to hold up as evidence of what was agreed.

What does the employee see?

Employees can access anything issued to them through their Employee Console, under Skills and Files, the same place they already go for team-wide policies and assessments. They can review the content, view any attachments, and provide their signature where one's required, all without a separate login or a paper form to chase down.

Why this matters

For a lot of businesses, this closes a real gap. Contracts, warnings, and incident documentation are some of the most important paperwork HR handles, and until now, they've often lived outside the system that tracks everything else about that employee. With Personal Files, that documentation sits on the same profile as their onboarding, their skills, their leave, and their pay history, with a signature trail you can actually rely on if a document is ever questioned later.

If you're already using Skills and Files for team-wide policies and assessments, Pesonal Files is the individual-document counterpart you've been missing. It's included in both the Standard and Enterprise plans, so if you're already on either of those, it's available to set up now, log in to Microkeeper and check your HR settings for template access. Read the full Personal Files guide

If you're not yet a Microkeeper customer and want to see how it fits your business, book a free consultation