Profile & demographics
Identity, contact, address, marital status, race, veteran status, EEO-1 categorization. With SSN protected by two-layer encryption.
Module · Core HRM
The employee record every other module reads from.
Profiles, family, positions, compensation, supplemental earnings, ministry-specific tax handling, time away, and the security model that keeps payroll dollars private by default. Every other module reads from this.
What's in Core HRM
Everything the ministry admin job actually tracks.
Not generic HR fields wrapped in a logo. The records, allowances, and elections a payroll admin at a multi-campus ministry deals with on a Tuesday afternoon.
Position history
Multiple positions per employee, primary + secondary managers, campus + department, salary grade, effective dates. Full history preserved.
Family records
Relations, phone, date of birth, encrypted SSNs. Useful for benefits eligibility and emergency contacts.
Compensation
Salary or hourly rate, pay profile assignment, EEO-1 categorization, full compensation history over time.
Earnings & deductions
Health insurance, 403(b) Roth or traditional, life insurance, housing allowance, plus supplemental earnings like cell phone or gas allowance.
Tax handling
Federal + multi-state W-4 elections, FICA & Medicare opt-outs, 4361 certified clergy, local tax detection. Powered by Symmetry.
People at the center
One record. Every detail you actually need.
The profile holds the things ministry HR admins are constantly asked for: who lives where, who their emergency contact is, when they were hired full-time vs part-time, what campus and department they belong to, who their managers are.
Family members live in the same record — relations, phone numbers, encrypted SSNs — so dependents for benefits eligibility don't get tracked in a separate spreadsheet. Position history is preserved with effective dates, so when a campus pastor was promoted to overseer last March, you can still see what they were doing in February.
- EEO-1 categorization on every position (no end-of-year scramble)
- Primary + secondary managers for cross-campus oversight
- Separation card on the same page — clean offboarding without a new screen
Compensation & earnings
Pay history, supplemental earnings, and benefits — all on the employee.
Salary, pay profile, exempt status, EEO-1 — set once, used by every payroll run. The compensation page shows a calendar of pay periods and a payment history that's filterable down to the line.
Supplemental earnings like a $45/month cell phone allowance live next to retirement contributions and life insurance — not in a separate one-off-payments tool. When an employee asks "what's in my paycheck and why," the answer is on one screen.
Tax handling — including ministry-specific
Clergy housing, FICA opt-outs, and 4361. Natively, not as workarounds.
Most HRIS platforms can technically store a housing allowance. They cannot natively model a clergy member who has elected out of FICA and Medicare under Form 4361, with multi-state W-4 elections, while also opting the employer out of FUTA and SUTA.
CarbonHRM does. Every tax election is per-employee. Federal and state W-4s, employee opt-outs, employer opt-outs, 403(b) opt-outs, clergy opt-outs — all visible on one page. Symmetry Tax Engine handles the calculation; we handle the elections.
- Federal + state W-4 elections
- 4361 Certified flag drives SE-tax exemption automatically
- Local taxes detected by address (Irondale-OLF, etc.)
- A what-if estimator employees can run themselves before changing elections
The ministry-specific cases CarbonHRM handles →
Year-end W-2s and 1099s →
Time away & rollover
Vacation and PTO with the math you actually use.
Vacation and PTO are tracked as separate buckets. Each one shows the four numbers a ministry admin actually wants to see together: BASE (what the policy gives), ADJ (any one-off adjustments — bereavement add, mission-trip credit), ROLLOVER (carried from last year), and USED.
Exempt employees show ∞ for both buckets — no awkward "9999 hour" workaround. Time-off requests live on the same page, with day-by-day hour breakdowns so a partial Friday doesn't get rounded up to a full day.
Security & access — the trust story
The product literally tells you whether you can see dollars.
Most HR systems hand admins a password and call it security. CarbonHRM has a sensitive-data tier above the role: every menu item declares whether it shows dollars, and every employee profile shows whether the assigned roles, in combination, give that person Personal Dollars Only or Can See Dollars access at the org level.
Security groups stack. A worship pastor might have HR + Worship Production Team + 12 others. The page shows you all of them, the page count each contributes, and which ones expose dollars. SSNs are protected by two-layer encryption — field-level on top of TLS, masked everywhere except an explicit edit action.
- Per-page View / Edit / Download / See-Dollars permission grid
- Role assignments are auditable — every change captured with actor + timestamp
- Cross-organization isolation enforced at the application behavior level
Self-service · web + mobile
Your staff can run the math themselves.
The same employee record powers a self-service dashboard for staff. They see their next pay date, vacation and PTO balances, time-off request flow, paperless tax docs, and a paycheck estimator that lets them model a W-4 change before they submit one — so HR doesn't field the same "what does this mean for my take-home" question every January.
Mobile covers profile, compensation, PTO request and approve, and time entry and approve. Bank details are masked end-to-end with a paperless toggle that flips W-2 delivery in one tap.
Pairs well with
Core HRM is the foundation. Most ministries pair it with these.
Payroll Pre-pay or post-pay runs, the Symmetry Tax Engine wired to the elections you already entered. Leave Management Deeper PTO policies, holiday handling, FMLA, accruals — when the time-away surface in HRM isn't enough. Onboarding Where these employee records start. New-hire flow that lands the data straight into the profile. Timekeeping Hours that flow into payroll. Approvals, mobile time entry, exception handling.
See what HRM looks like for your ministry.
30-minute walkthrough. We'll show you the profile, the tax handling, and the security model on real ministry data.