FAQ and troubleshooting

This chapter is for the moment something does not work the way you expected. It is organised by symptom rather than by feature, so you can scan for the message on your screen or the thing that went wrong, read a short answer, and either fix it yourself or know exactly who to ask. It is written for everyone who uses MusterHR — employees, managers, HR and finance — and each answer says which of those it applies to. If you are new to the product, start with Getting started instead.

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Signing in

My password is not being accepted

The sign-in page shows one message for several different problems: That email, password or two-factor code is not correct. This is deliberate — the page will not tell a stranger whether an email address is registered. It appears when any of the following is true.

Passwords are matched exactly, including capitals. Email addresses are not — they are lowercased before checking, so Priya@finaldoc.io and priya@finaldoc.io are the same account.

"Too many attempts. Please try again in a few minutes."

Your account is temporarily locked. MusterHR counts consecutive failed passwords on an account and, once the limit is reached, locks it for a fixed period. During the lock, even the correct password is refused.

Both the number of failures and the length of the lock are settings chosen by whoever installed MusterHR for your company. Out of the box the limit is five failed attempts and the lock lasts fifteen minutes, but your installation may differ, and the message on screen deliberately does not name the real duration.

Three things clear a lock without waiting:

1. Complete a password reset from Forgot password? — setting a new password clears the lock and the failure count.
2. Ask an administrator to open People → User accounts, find you, and use Generate reset link or Set password. Both clear the lock.
3. Wait for the lock to run out, then sign in with the correct password.

Every attempt, successful or not, is written to your sign-in history, so a lock is always explainable after the fact.

I have forgotten my password

1. Click Forgot password? on the sign-in page.
2. Enter your work email and click Send reset link.
3. Open the email and follow the link, which takes you to Reset password.
4. Choose a new password and confirm it.

The confirmation message ("If that email is registered, a reset link is on its way") is shown whether or not the address exists, so it is not proof that the email was sent.

Reset links last 60 minutes and work only once. Past that you see "This reset link isn't valid" and you need to request a new one. New passwords need at least 10 characters, with an uppercase and a lowercase letter, a number and a symbol. Completing a reset signs you out on every device.

I have been asked to change my password and there is no way out

If an administrator gave you a temporary password, MusterHR forces a change at your next sign-in. On that screen the sidebar and the sign-out button are both hidden until you have set a new password — there is deliberately no escape route.

Worth knowing: if you are on a shared or borrowed machine, this means you cannot leave the screen without completing the change. Close the browser window and sign in again from your own device.

I was signed out without doing anything

A signed-in session lasts eight hours, after which you sign in again. You are also signed out immediately, everywhere, when any of these happens:

• you change your own password, or complete a password reset
• an administrator uses Sign out everywhere, Suspend or Deactivate on your account
• an administrator sets a temporary password for you
• your exit is finalised in offboarding, which deactivates the login

Two-factor codes

If two-factor authentication is switched on for your account, sign-in asks for a six-digit code from your authenticator app after your password. If the field is not showing, click Use a two-factor code below the password box. Codes rotate every 30 seconds, so a code that expired a moment ago is rejected — wait for the next one.

Worth knowing: MusterHR supports two-factor at sign-in, but this version has no screen where you can switch it on for yourself. If your account does not already have it, ask whoever administers your installation.

I do not recognise a sign-in on my account

Go to My space → Sign-in activity. It lists recent sign-ins, sign-outs and failed attempts with the device, IP address and time in IST. If anything looks wrong, use Change password on that page and tell HR. Administrators can see the same history for any account under People → User accounts → Manage.

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"No employee record linked"

You will meet this on the dashboard, My profile, Attendance, Leave, My payslips, My documents, My assets, Policies and Holidays. It is not a fault, and nothing is broken.

MusterHR keeps two separate things: an employee record (someone's details, salary and history) and a user account (their login). Self-service pages read the employee record. A login that has never been attached to one has nothing to show, so those pages say so rather than rendering empty.

This is most common on HR and administrator logins, because those are often created directly as accounts rather than through onboarding. On an HR sign-in the dashboard says it plainly: "Your sign-in isn't connected to an employee record, so attendance, leave and payslips aren't available to you. HR links the two on the employee's record." The Find your HR contact button beside it takes you to the Directory.

Two routes create the link properly:

• Onboarding. Inviting someone from People → Onboarding creates the employee record, the login and the onboarding workflow together, already linked. This is the route that works end to end.
• Create login. If the employee record already exists but has no login, open the record under People → Employees, then use Send invite (they set their own password) or Create login with a temporary password. The email address you use must not already belong to another account.

If you are an HR or admin user who wants your own self-service pages to work, ask for an employee record to be created for you and a login attached to it. Everything you do as HR — approvals, employee management, reports — works perfectly well without one. See Employee records and profiles and Hiring, offers and onboarding.

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Attendance

I forgot to clock in or out

Fix it with a correction request, which your manager (or HR) approves onto your record.

1. Go to My space → Attendance.
2. Scroll to Request a correction.
3. Pick the Date — it must be today or a past date.
4. Enter In (IST). This is required.
5. Enter Out (IST) if you did clock out or should have. Leave it blank only if there genuinely was no clock-out; the day is then recorded with no clock-out.
6. Give a Reason — for example, "Forgot to clock out".
7. Click Request correction.

The request appears under My correction requests and goes to your approver's Attendance approvals queue. Approving replaces that day's recorded times, so always give the full day rather than only the missing half. The outcome comes back as a notification.

The clock says I have already clocked in

MusterHR allows one attendance session per calendar day (IST). "You have already clocked in today" means the day is already open; use Clock out when you finish. "You have already clocked out today" means the day is closed — anything further needs a correction request.

Older days are sitting open

If you clocked in on a past day and never clocked out, that day stays open. HR sees a Missing clock-outs figure on the dashboard, hinted as "Earlier days left open — fixed by an attendance correction."

Worth knowing: there is no screen that lists those open days for you. Check your own month on My space → Attendance — a day with an In time and no Out is one of them — and send a correction for each.

My correction was rejected

Rejections appear in My correction requests with their status, and you are notified. Ask your manager what times they expected, then send a fresh request. There is no limit on how many you may send.

More detail in Attendance.

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Leave

I applied for the wrong dates

Cancel the request and apply again. There is no edit.

1. Go to My space → Leave.
2. Find the row under My requests.
3. Click Cancel and confirm.

A pending request is withdrawn. An approved request that you cancel puts the days back into your balance (for paid types) — the confirmation dialog says so, and warns that cancelling cannot be undone; you would have to apply again. Cancelling an approved comp-off leave returns the credit.

Leave requests only ever have four states.

My leave balance looks wrong

Work through these in order.

• Weekly offs and public holidays inside your dates are not charged. If you apply from Friday to Monday and the office is closed at the weekend, you are charged two days, not four. Optional (restricted) holidays are ordinary working days unless you individually avail one, so they are charged.
• Applying reserves the days immediately. The balance tile shows used and pending separately; a pending request has already reduced what is available even though nobody has approved it.
• Balances reset in April. MusterHR runs on the Indian financial year, April to March. Each new financial year starts fresh at the leave type's annual quota. Worth knowing: this version does not carry unused days over into the new year automatically, and there is no screen for adjusting a balance by hand — raise it with HR, who can explain what your company's policy is.
• Comp-off is not a quota. It is a ledger of credits you earned by working a holiday or weekly off, and each credit expires 90 days after the day you worked. A credit that has expired drops out of the available figure.
• Unpaid types have no balance. Leave Without Pay and Work From Home show "No quota — apply any time · no balance to draw on".

If the numbers still do not add up, take a screenshot of your My leave page and send it to HR.

"Those dates are all weekly-offs or public holidays"

Every day you selected is a non-working day, so there is nothing to apply for. Adjust the dates. If you actually worked on one of those days, claim a comp-off instead from the same page.

"You already have a leave request overlapping these dates"

You have a pending or approved request that covers at least one of the days. Cancel or amend that one first — rejected and cancelled requests do not block you.

Half-day leave is not being offered

A half day must be a single date, so pick the same date for From and To. Not every leave type allows half days; an optional (restricted) holiday, for example, is always a whole day.

More detail in Leave and holidays.

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Payslips and pay

My payslip is missing

Payslips only reach employees once finance publishes the run. Before that they exist as drafts that nobody outside payroll can see, and My payslips stays empty. You get a notification the moment yours is published.

If a colleague has theirs and you do not, one of these is usually the reason.

The Salary structures page names the second case plainly: an employee with nothing on record shows "no structure or pay on record — payroll will skip them".

A figure on my payslip looks wrong

Payslips are a snapshot. When payslips are generated, MusterHR copies the employee's current salary structure into the payslip and stores it there; changing the structure afterwards does not alter a payslip that already exists.

While a run is still a draft, finance can add or remove earnings and deductions on an individual payslip. Once the run is finalised and published, that door closes — publishing cannot be undone, and the correction has to be made on a later month's payslip. Raise the discrepancy with finance, quoting the month and the line item.

The payroll report does not match a payslip

Worth knowing: the payroll summary under Payroll & reports → Reports always sums the salaries in force today, regardless of the period you are looking at. The page says so itself: "Salary in force as at [today's date], for every active employee. These are current CTC figures, not a payroll run for a past month." Anyone with no salary on record counts as nil, which pulls the average down. For what was actually paid in a given month, open that month's payroll run.

More detail in Payroll and payslips.

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Documents

My document was rejected

A rejected row shows the reason HR gave, in red, underneath the Rejected badge, together with the fix: upload a corrected file above in the same category — it is filed as a new version rather than replacing the old one. Documents have three states:

My upload was refused

Only PDF, JPG and PNG files are accepted, up to 10 MB. An empty file is refused too. If a photo from your phone is too large, save it as a PDF or reduce its resolution before uploading.

A download link stopped working

Download links are generated on demand and expire five minutes after you ask for one, and every download is logged. Click Download again to get a fresh link. Do not copy a link and share it — it will be dead by the time it arrives, and the download would be recorded against your name.

Worth knowing: Download as PDF on some screens opens the file in your browser rather than saving it. Use your browser's own save command from there.

More detail in Documents, policies and announcements.

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Finding your way around

A page described in this guide is not in my sidebar

That is permissions, not a fault. Every role sees a different sidebar, and the server refuses anything your role does not cover — the interface only hides what would be refused anyway. A Finance sign-in, for example, has no People → Employees entry at all, while an Employee sign-in has only My space and Company.

Check what your role covers in Roles and permissions. If you genuinely need the access, ask a Super Admin: roles are granted under People → User accounts → Manage, and each change takes effect the next time you load a page — no need to sign out.

I know the page exists but cannot find it

Press ⌘K on a Mac or Ctrl+K on Windows from any screen; typing / opens the same search. It lists only the pages you are allowed to open, so it never sends you somewhere that would be refused. You can search by what you want to do as well as by name — "clock in" finds Attendance, "salary slip" finds My payslips, "accounts" finds User accounts. Use the arrow keys and Enter, or Escape to close.

"Access denied"

You followed a link to a page your role does not cover. The page says: "You don't have permission to view this page. If you think this is a mistake, contact your HR administrator." Use Back to dashboard.

"We couldn't find that"

The page or record is not there. Commonly the link is out of date, or the record has been removed — an offboarded employee, a cancelled payroll run. It can also appear at a permission boundary, so it does not always mean the record never existed.

"This page didn't load"

Something failed on the server. Nothing you were working on is lost. Click Try again first. If it keeps happening, note the Reference code shown at the bottom of the error screen and include it when you write to support — it matches the entry in the server log.

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Email and links

An invitation or reset link has expired

Every emailed link is single-use and time-limited.

Opening the newest email matters: sending a new invitation does not disable the old one, but each link works only once, and an older link may already have expired.

Worth knowing: nothing in this version re-issues an email verification link. If yours has expired and 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 — they can set a temporary password for you.

No email is arriving

Check the obvious first: spam and promotions folders, and whether the address on the account is the one you are watching.

Worth knowing: MusterHR can be installed with its email delivery set to a console provider, which writes invitation and reset links to the server log instead of sending them. This is the default configuration, and some smaller installations never change it. If your workspace is set up that way, no email will ever arrive, and that is expected.

The interface is built to work anyway. When an administrator generates a reset link, resends an invitation or creates a login, the link or temporary password is displayed on screen so it can be handed over directly — by phone, chat or in person. Administrators: if nobody is receiving email, use that displayed value rather than waiting, and ask whoever installed MusterHR to configure a real mail provider.

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People and records

A colleague has left but still appears

It depends how far their exit has gone. An exit only removes someone from view when it is finalised on the last step of offboarding — that sets their employee status to Exited, deactivates their login and signs them out everywhere.

• The Directory lists people who are Onboarding, Active or On notice. Someone still showing there has not been finalised.
• People → Employees deliberately includes everyone, and says so: "8 people on record, including onboarding and exited". Use the Status filter to narrow it.
• A person mid-exit shows as On notice — approved to leave, clearance under way, still able to sign in.

If someone has genuinely gone and still shows as Active, their offboarding case has not been completed. See Assets and offboarding.

Someone is stuck on "Onboarding"

Worth knowing: an employee created through Add employee gets the status Onboarding, but no onboarding workflow is created for them. They never appear on the Onboarding screen, and nothing in the interface can move them to Active. The route that works end to end is inviting the person from People → Onboarding instead. If someone is already stuck this way, write to support.

An asset is stuck "In repair"

Worth knowing: an asset marked In repair cannot be returned to Available in this version. The assign form is hidden for it, because assigning would only fail. The only way out of the state is to retire the asset and add it again.

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What you can see about yourself, and what HR sees

You see your own record in full on My space → My profile. What differs is who else can see which parts of it.

Two things are worth spelling out. First, bank and identity numbers are never sent to the browser in full — only the last few digits are shown, and asking for the rest with Reveal writes an entry in the audit log naming who revealed it and when. Second, payslip access is narrower than employee access on purpose: HR can see the salary figure on someone's record, but payslips and salary structures belong to finance. A manager's view of a report is limited to what the approval screens need — My team shows their attendance, and Leave approvals shows the requests waiting on them.

You can edit your own mobile number, alternate number and personal email directly on My profile. Name and address are held by HR — use Request a change and it is applied once approved. See Employee records and profiles.

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General questions

Does MusterHR file our PF, ESI or TDS returns?

No. MusterHR runs payroll and produces payslips, with configurable components including PF, TDS and Professional Tax, but it does not compute statutory rates or file returns with the authorities. Your CA or filing agent still does that.

Can we import our existing employee data?

Yes. Write to hello@musterhr.com with your current spreadsheet or export, and the team will help map and load it into your workspace.

Can we self-host MusterHR?

Yes, on the Enterprise plan. MusterHR ships as a Docker Compose stack with PostgreSQL, so it runs on your own server or private cloud.

What happens when the free trial ends?

The trial runs for 14 days and needs no card to start. Your data stays exactly where it is. Pick a plan to carry on, or leave the workspace idle — nothing is deleted without telling you first. Plans are Starter, Growth and Enterprise, priced per active employee per month; a trial workspace is limited to 25 seats.

Who can see salary and bank details?

Only the roles you grant. Salary structures, payroll runs and payslips sit with Finance (and Super Admin); the salary figure on an employee record is visible to HR / Ops (and Super Admin); everyone sees their own. Bank and identity numbers are masked for everybody, and every reveal is logged. A manager sees no pay information for their reports.

Is our data encrypted?

Sensitive fields — bank details, identity numbers, tax records and two-factor secrets — are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and masked in the interface. Passwords are hashed with argon2id and are never stored or displayed in a recoverable form. Changes and sensitive reads are written to an audit log.

How do we get support?

Write to hello@musterhr.com. When you report a problem, include what you were doing, what you expected instead, and the Reference code from any error screen. Administrators and self-hosting teams should also read the operational documentation that ships with the product.

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Where to read more

Getting started · Roles and permissions · Employee records and profiles · Hiring, offers and onboarding · Attendance · Leave and holidays · Payroll and payslips · Documents, policies and announcements · Performance reviews and probation · Assets and offboarding · Reports, settings and administration · Glossary