Getting started

This chapter covers what MusterHR is, how a company workspace is created and what the 14-day trial includes, how to sign in (and what to do when you cannot), how invitations work for people joining an existing company, and how to find your way around the app. It is written both for the person setting MusterHR up for the first time and for an employee who has just received an invitation email.

What MusterHR is

MusterHR is an HR system for Indian companies. It replaces the attendance register, the leave email thread and the payroll spreadsheet with one place that holds your people records, attendance, leave, payroll, documents, policies, performance reviews and exits — from a candidate's offer letter through to their full-and-final settlement.

It is built around Indian defaults rather than adapted to them:

MusterHR runs your payroll and produces payslips. It does not compute statutory rates or file PF, ESI or TDS returns with the authorities — your CA or filing agent still does that.

MusterHR is published by FinalDoc Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Two addresses: the website and the app

There are two hostnames, and it saves confusion to know which is which.

Bookmark app.musterhr.com — that is where you work. The two hostnames keep themselves tidy: opening a product page such as /login on musterhr.com forwards you to the app, and opening app.musterhr.com on its own takes you to your dashboard. Pages inside the app are deliberately kept out of search engines.

Creating your workspace

Anyone can create a workspace from the website. Doing so makes you the first Super Admin of that company.

1. Go to musterhr.com and click Start free trial (or open app.musterhr.com/signup directly).
2. Fill in Company name, Your name and Work email. Use the address you want to sign in with.
3. Choose a Password and repeat it in Confirm password. The rule is at least 10 characters, with an uppercase and a lowercase letter, a number and a symbol.
4. Click Start free trial. The screen changes to Check your email.
5. Open the email titled "Confirm your MusterHR workspace" and click Confirm and create workspace. The link is valid for 24 hours.
6. On the confirmation page click Confirm and create workspace again to finish. You land on the sign-in page with the notice "Workspace created — sign in to get started."
7. Sign in with the email and password you chose.

Nothing is created until you open that link. The signup form only sends the email; your company, your account and your data come into existence when you confirm. If you never click, nothing is left behind and no account exists for you.

Two things follow from that:

• The confirmation screen is deliberately vague. It says the same thing whether or not the address was already registered, so the form cannot be used to find out who has an account. If no email arrives and you think you may already have an account, go to Sign in and use Forgot password? instead.
• One email address belongs to exactly one workspace. You cannot reuse an address that is already registered anywhere on MusterHR.

The signup form also carries anti-abuse checks. If it answers "That was quick — please take a moment and submit again", or asks you to complete a verification challenge, work through it and submit again; nothing has been lost, and the fields you typed are handed back to you.

What is created with your workspace

So that the workspace is usable on day one, confirming your signup also creates:

The seven leave types are:

Worth knowing. These leave types are created once, at signup. There is no screen in MusterHR for adding a leave type or changing a quota, so plan around the seven above or write to hello@musterhr.com. See Leave and holidays for how each of them behaves.

The 14-day trial

Your workspace starts on a 14-day free trial. No card is required, and the trial is created with an allowance of 25 employees. The published plans are:

Prices are per active employee per month, billed annually in INR — people who have left do not count. Every trial includes the full Growth feature set.

At the end of the trial, your data stays exactly where it is. You pick a plan to carry on, or leave the workspace idle; nothing is deleted without telling you first.

Worth knowing. MusterHR has no billing or plan screen inside the app: there is no countdown, no upgrade button and no card form to fill in. Choosing a plan, adding seats or moving to Enterprise is arranged by writing to hello@musterhr.com.

Your first sign-in

1. Go to app.musterhr.com.
2. Enter your Work email and Password.
3. Click Sign in. You land on Dashboard.

The dashboard greets you by name, shows the date in IST, and states which account and role you are signed in as — for example "Signed in as aditi@finaldoc.io" with the role Super Admin beneath your name.

If your account was created by signup, you will also see a panel headed No employee record linked: "Your sign-in isn't connected to an employee record, so attendance, leave and payslips aren't available to you." That is normal and not a fault. A user account is a login; an employee record holds someone's employment details. The founder's login starts without one, which is why My space pages such as Attendance and My payslips have nothing to show you. See Employee records and profiles.

A sign-in lasts up to eight hours, after which you are asked to sign in again.

Your first week as a new admin

A sensible order for the first few days. Each step links to the chapter that covers it properly.

1. Set your branding. Go to People → Company settings (Super Admin only) and upload a Logo file (PNG, JPG, WebP or SVG, under 2 MB) and pick a Brand colour, then Save colour. Your logo replaces the MusterHR mark in the sidebar and appears on documents you issue. The sign-in page keeps the MusterHR look, because before anyone signs in there is no way to know whose branding to show. See Reports, settings and administration.
2. Check the holiday calendar. Go to Company → Holidays. The calendar covers one financial year (for example FY Apr 2026 – Mar 2027) and separates Public holidays (office closed) from Optional (restricted) holidays (office open unless someone avails one). Use Add a holiday for anything missing and Remove for anything that does not apply to you. Only Super Admin and HR / Ops can edit it. See Leave and holidays.
3. Read the leave types. Open My space → Leave or the table above and check the quotas match your policy before people start applying.
4. Invite your people. Go to People → Onboarding and use Invite a candidate: name, email, type (Employee, Intern, Contractor or Consultant), joining date, department, designation and reporting manager. They receive a secure link, set their own password and fill in their joining details. See Hiring, offers and onboarding.
5. Give people the right roles. Go to People → User accounts, open a person and use Roles & access. Only a Super Admin can change roles, and the last Super Admin cannot have that role removed. See Roles and permissions.
6. Publish your policies and a welcome announcement, so people have something to acknowledge on day one. See Documents, policies and announcements.
7. Set salary structures before your first payroll run. See Payroll and payslips.

Worth knowing. People → Employees → Add employee creates a record without an account or an onboarding workflow, and such a record can stick on the status "Onboarding" with nothing in the interface able to move it to Active. For anyone who needs to sign in, invite them from Onboarding instead. The Add employee page says so itself.

How invitations work

Employees never sign up for themselves — they are invited, and the invitation is what creates their login.

1. HR invites them from People → Onboarding.
2. They receive an email, "You're invited to MusterHR", with an Accept invitation button. The link is valid for 72 hours and works once.
3. The link opens Welcome to MusterHR, showing the address it was issued to. They enter Create a password and Confirm password (same rule: at least 10 characters, with an uppercase and a lowercase letter, a number and a symbol) and click Activate account.
4. They land on the sign-in page with "Account activated — sign in to continue", sign in, and complete their joining details.

If the link has expired or has already been used, the page says "This invitation link isn't valid". Ask HR to send a fresh one: on People → User accounts, an account still showing Invited has a Resend invite button, and the new link is valid for three days. Always open the newest email.

Every user account is in one of four states:

Signing in day to day

Go to app.musterhr.com, enter your Work email and Password, and click Sign in. Depending on how you arrived, you may see a green notice at the top of the form:

If something is wrong, the message is deliberately unspecific: "That email, password or two-factor code is not correct." MusterHR will not tell you which part was wrong, or whether an address is registered at all.

If you forget your password

1. Click Forgot password? on the sign-in form.
2. Enter your Work email and click Send reset link. The screen changes to Check your email; the reply is the same whether or not the address is registered.
3. Open the email "Reset your password — MusterHR" and click Reset password. The link is valid for 60 minutes and works once.
4. Enter a New password and Confirm password, then click Reset password.
5. Sign in with the new password.

Setting a new password signs you out on every device, including the one you are using — that is deliberate, and it cannot be undone from here. If the link has expired, the page offers Request a new link.

If you cannot receive email, an admin can help from People → User accounts — open your account and either Generate reset link (a one-hour link they hand to you directly) or Set password, which sets a temporary password, ends every session you have open and makes you change it at your next sign-in. In that case MusterHR takes you straight to Change your password and holds you there until it is done: while a change is being forced there is no navigation and no sign-out on that screen.

You can change your password at any time from the user menu → Change password, or from My space → Sign-in activity.

Two-factor authentication

If your account has two-factor authentication switched on, MusterHR asks for a six-digit code from your authenticator app after your password is accepted. The sign-in form says "This account is protected by two-factor authentication. Enter the 6-digit code from your authenticator app" and reveals a Two-factor code field. You can also open that field yourself before submitting, with Use a two-factor code.

Failed second steps are recorded on your account: Failed sign-in — wrong 2FA code and Failed sign-in — 2FA not completed both appear in My space → Sign-in activity.

Worth knowing. There is no screen in MusterHR for switching two-factor on or off yourself. Sign-in supports it, but enabling it is not something you can do from your profile — write to hello@musterhr.com if you need it.

If you are locked out

Check My space → Sign-in activity for the record. It lists sign-ins, sign-outs and failed attempts, newest first, with the device, IP address and IST timestamp — including Sign-in blocked — account locked and Signed out — password changed. If you see a sign-in you do not recognise, change your password and tell HR.

Worth knowing. A verification link for an email address cannot be re-issued from anywhere in the product. If you reach the Verify your email page and the link has expired, but you can already sign in, your address is confirmed and there is nothing left to do. If you cannot sign in, ask HR to check your account.

Finding your way around

The sidebar is grouped, and you only see the groups your role gives you. An employee sees Dashboard, My space and Company; HR and Super Admins see all six.

If a page described in this guide is not in your sidebar, your role does not include it. That is by design — permissions are enforced on the server, and the sidebar only hides what the server would refuse anyway. See Roles and permissions.

Click a group heading to collapse it, or Collapse at the foot of the sidebar to shrink it to a narrow rail of icons. Both choices are remembered in that browser. On a phone the sidebar becomes a menu button in the top-left corner.

The ⌘K command palette is the fastest way anywhere. Press ⌘K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows), click Search in the header, or just type / when you are not already typing in a field. Type into Search pages…, move with the arrow keys, press Enter to go, Esc to close. It searches by intent as well as by name — "clock in" finds Attendance, "salary slip" finds My payslips, "roles" finds User accounts — and it only ever lists pages you are allowed to open.

The notifications bell in the header carries a badge with your unread count, shown as 9+ once you pass nine. It opens Notifications: approvals, leave decisions, payslips, policies and reviews addressed to you, with Mark all … as read at the top. The list shows the 40 most recent items and older ones are not listed, though marking all as read still covers every unread one.

The theme toggle (sun or moon) beside the bell switches between light and dark for that browser.

The user menu at the top right shows your name and roles. Opening it gives you My profile, Change password and Sign out.

Two smaller touches: a Skip to content link appears when you press Tab on a fresh page, and your company's logo replaces the MusterHR mark at the top of the sidebar once an admin has uploaded one.

Where to go next

• Roles and permissions — who can see and do what
• Employee records and profiles — records, the directory, change requests
• Hiring, offers and onboarding — inviting candidates and their joining details
• Attendance and Leave and holidays — day-to-day self-service
• FAQ and troubleshooting — if something is not behaving

For help, write to hello@musterhr.com.