Starting a new organization on U HR is designed to take fifteen minutes, not fifteen weeks. The platform's self-serve registration at apps.ukkera.org/hr/register opens a workspace immediately, with no procurement cycle, no implementation partner, and no up-front data-migration contract. Within that workspace, the U HR Manager app's three foundational objects — Organizations, Companies, and Departments — let you model a Saudi holding company, a single legal entity, or a multi-site contractor in minutes rather than months. Employees are then invited into the U HR Employee app, where their Employee Profile, Attendance, and Self-Service Requests become available on day one. This quick-start guide walks through the seven steps that take you from an empty workspace to a live first leave request. We focus on the minimum viable configuration that gets your people productive without burying you in optional features.
Before you start, gather five items: a domain-based email address for the organization owner (Google, Microsoft, or any provider works), the trade-licence or commercial-registration number for each legal entity you plan to add, the IBAN and bank code for the company bank account you will use for Wage Protection System (WPS) submissions, the Saudi ID or Iqama numbers of the first ten employees you want to invite, and a simple list of departments you will set up. None of this is mandatory to register — you can create the workspace with just an email — but having these five items within reach prevents the stop-and-start pattern that turns a fifteen-minute setup into a half-day project. The trade-licence number is what enables GOSI and Mudad-compatible WPS file generation later, so it is worth entering correctly the first time. The IBAN is what makes the WPS file usable by your bank without manual reformatting, which is the difference between a clean first pay cycle and one that needs rework.
Step 1 — Register at apps.ukkera.org/hr/register #
The registration page accepts your email address and a password, then sends a verification link. Clicking the link opens an empty U HR workspace with you as the organization owner. The workspace is immediately bilingual — switch between English and Arabic from the top-right language toggle at any moment, and the entire interface including every form label, error message, and help tip flips to RTL Arabic natively. No third-party SSO is required to start, although your IT team can wire Ukkera SSO later if you prefer corporate credentials. The owner account you just created appears in the HR Accounts screen of the U HR Manager app with full Permissions & Roles from the start; you can grant finer-grained rights to other HR administrators once you have added them. The 14-day trial window starts the moment registration completes, so plan to invite your first employees on the same day you register to maximize the trial period.
Step 2 — Create your organization and add companies #
The first object you create in the U HR Manager app is an Organization. An Organization in U HR is the top-level owner — typically the holding company, the family business, or the parent group. You enter the legal name in both Arabic and English, attach the trade-licence scan, and assign an owner. Below the Organization, you add one or more Companies — each Company is a separate legal entity with its own commercial registration, its own GOSI establishment code, and its own Nitaqat band. If you are a single-entity employer, you create one Company; if you are a Saudi holding with three subsidiaries in construction, retail, and professional services, you create three Companies. This Organizations → Companies → Departments hierarchy is what enables U HR to compute Saudization ratios per legal entity rather than as a blended group number — which is exactly what an MHRSD auditor expects to see. Take a moment to enter each Company's registration number accurately, because that number becomes the anchor for GOSI contribution schedules and WPS file headers downstream.
Step 3 — Build your department structure #
Inside each Company, you create Departments. A Department carries a code, an org scope, and a reporting line — and serves as the natural unit for attendance oversight, approval routing, and Nitaqat weighting by job family. A construction company typically sets up Departments such as Site Operations, HSE, Procurement, Finance, and HR; a healthcare operator sets up Nursing, Medical Staff, Allied Health, Administration, and Facilities. Keep your first department list short — five to ten Departments per Company is plenty for a first day. You can always add more later through the same Departments screen. Each Department can be scoped to a project site or workspace later through the Projects & Teams feature, but for the fifteen-minute start, a flat department list is enough to begin inviting employees. The goal of step three is to have a structure your employees recognize when they open the U HR Employee app for the first time.
Step 4 — Invite employees and HR accounts #
Inviting employees happens in two complementary ways. For your first ten to fifty employees, the Bulk Uploads feature accepts a spreadsheet with employee name, email or mobile, national ID or Iqama, department, position, and level — and validates each row before committing it, surfacing errors such as a mismatched ID format or a department code that does not exist yet. For larger cohorts of hundreds or thousands of employees, the same Bulk Uploads screen handles the volume with a progress bar and per-row error reporting, so you can fix and re-upload only the failing rows. Each successfully imported employee receives an invitation to the U HR Employee app, where they complete their Employee Profile, see their Working & Finance Info, and gain access to Attendance and Self-Service Requests. In parallel, you add HR administrators through the HR Accounts screen, assigning each administrator a role scoped to a specific Company or Department via Permissions & Roles. A typical first-day configuration is one HR Manager per Company with full CRUD rights, plus one Employee Manager account at the Organization level for the group HR leader.
Step 5 — Configure approval workflows and permissions #
With the structure and people in place, the next step is to wire the approval pathways that route every leave, advance, permit, and payslip to the right reviewer. The Approval Workflows feature in the Employee Manager app lets you define a chain — for example, a leave request from an employee in Company A's Site Operations department flows first to their line manager, then to the HR Manager of Company A, then closes. Skill and level changes route through a parallel Approval Management screen in the U HR Manager app, where each approval carries a reviewer and a status stamp for audit. Permissions & Roles controls which administrators can create, edit, delete, or merely fetch records in each module — the granularity that makes multi-company holdings auditable under NDMO. A practical first-day configuration is to enable Self-Service Requests for leaves and permits only, deferring the more complex skill and level approval chains until your second week. This keeps the first wave of employee activity focused on attendance and leave, which is what new employees naturally use first.
Step 6 — First attendance check-in #
On the morning after invitations go out, ask one employee to open the U HR Employee app on their phone and tap the Attendance check-in button. Their check-in is recorded with a timestamp and, depending on your configuration, a location stamp and a reviewer confirmation. The line manager sees the check-in appear in their Attendance Oversight view inside the Employee Manager app, and the HR Manager sees the daily attendance tally in the Company-level dashboard. This single action validates that the employee's profile, department, position, and approval chain are all wired correctly — and that the data model is ready for the WPS file generation that begins at the end of the month. If the check-in does not appear for the manager within a minute, the most common cause is that the employee's Department was not assigned a reporting line, which is a thirty-second fix in the Departments screen.
Step 7 — First leave request #
The last step of the fifteen-minute start is the first leave request. An employee opens Self-Service Requests, picks the leave type — annual, sick, emergency, or unpaid — enters the dates in Hijri or Gregorian, and submits. The request lands in the line manager's queue with the employee's current leave balance displayed alongside, drawn from the Working & Finance Info module. The manager approves or rejects with a note, and the employee receives a Notification in real time inside the U HR Employee app — no email or WhatsApp required. Once that request closes, you have a complete loop: the organization, company, department, employee, manager, and HR administrator have all touched the system end-to-end. From here, the natural next steps are configuring Earnings & Deduction Rules for your first payroll cycle, generating your first Payslips, and standing up the Skill Catalog and Level Definitions for your career framework — all of which build on the foundation you just laid.
After the fifteen-minute start, the first week should focus on three follow-up activities that compound value quickly. First, complete the employee data cleanup — verify that every employee's Working & Finance Info reflects their contract salary, allowances, and deduction rules so that the first payroll cycle runs cleanly. Second, document your approval routing for at least the top three request types (leave, permits, advances) and run a calibration test with one volunteer per department to catch any configuration errors before they scale. Third, schedule a thirty-minute walkthrough with the group HR leader to review the Org-Wide Visibility dashboard and decide which People Analytics views will become the weekly executive ritual. Treat these as the bridge between quick-start and the best-practices phase: the foundation is laid, the building can begin.