Employment terms record how each person is employed: what kind of worker they are, and the type of contract they're on. Aboard tracks this on every employment, keeps a dated history when it changes, and makes it available in your people list, reports, exports, and the API.
You'll find employment terms on a person's individual employment (People → a person → Employment → open an employment period). You manage the available contract types in Settings → People → Employment forms.
The two parts of employment terms
Each set of employment terms combines two things:
Worker type - the person's employment classification. Choose from Employee, Contractor, Intern, Agency worker, Apprentice, Board member, or Other.
Employment form - the type of contract. Aboard ships with Permanent, Fixed term, Seasonal, Casual / On call, and Other, and you can add your own (see Customise your employment forms below).
A person can also have a short note on each set of terms — handy for context like a contract reference or the reason for a change.
Set employment terms for an employee
Go to People and open the person.
Open the Employment tab. The top of the page summarises the current Worker type and Employment form.
Under Employments, open the relevant employment period. Its Employment terms section lists the current terms and any past or future ones, each with its effective date.
Click Add terms (or the + on the terms card).
In the New employment terms dialog, fill in:
Worker type — defaults to Employee; select from the list.
Employment form — search and select a form.
Effective date — the date these terms take effect.
Note — optional.
Click Create. The new terms appear in the list, and the set whose effective date has arrived is shown as current.
To change or remove a set of terms, use the ⋯ menu next to it and choose Edit or Delete.
Keep a history with effective dates
Employment terms are effective-dated. When someone's situation changes, say they move from a fixed-term contract to permanent, or from contractor to employee, you don't overwrite the old terms. You add a new set with the date the change takes effect.
Aboard then shows the right terms for any point in time: the current terms are the most recent set whose effective date has passed, and the earlier sets stay on the record as history. You can also add terms with a future effective date to schedule a change ahead of time.
💡 Effective dates can't fall before the employment's start date or after its end date.
Customise your employment forms
Employment forms are managed per company in Settings → People → Employment forms.
The five built-in forms (Permanent, Fixed term, Seasonal, Casual / On call, Other) are marked Default. They can't be renamed or deleted, and they show in each user's own language.
To add your own, for example Apprenticeship or a region-specific contract type, click Add form and give it a Name (what people see) and an Identifier (a stable short code). The identifier can't be changed after the form is created.
Custom forms can be edited (name only) or deleted from the ⋯ menu, as long as no one is using them.
Where employment terms appear
Once set, employment terms flow through the rest of Aboard:
People list - add Employment form as a column.
Reports - both employment form and worker type are available as columns.
Company exports - included as an
employment-termsfile, with one row per set of terms (email, effective date, worker type, employment form, note), so the full history is exported, not just the current terms.API - worker type and employment form are exposed on the v1 API. Employment terms are read-only there; employment forms can be created, updated, and deleted via the API.
Good to know
No setup was needed when this launched. Existing employees were automatically mapped onto the new employment terms, so every person already has a current worker type and employment form.
Worker type and employment form are independent - any worker type can be paired with any employment form.