The HCSS Credentials is the portal where your company assigns which employees get access to the necessary HCSS applications. It is also where you can set up users to be able to log in to resources like the HCSS Academy, and the Community.

Properly maintaining your HCSS Credentials Subscriptions is important to keeping your costs down, and evaluating utility for your users. If you are not regularly caring for these logins and subscriptions, you may be spending money on employees that were terminated or that could have changed roles and no longer need application access. With these best practices, we hope to save you from unnecessary spending and help you build processes to take control of your Credentials moving forward.

Here are some reasons that Credentials gets neglected:

• “I did not know that it existed or what it does,”
• “No one person was assigned ownership of it, and it became overwhelming,”
• “Everyone was given administrative access, so I thought someone else was maintaining it,”
• “Our champion left, and I was never trained to manage it.”
• I didn’t know access to HCSS Academy or Community requires a Credentials account.

The good news is that we continue to develop an interface that is simple and user-friendly. After interviewing HCSS experts that train small to large companies, I have found some best practices that have helped other companies find success with managing their HCSS Credentials.

1. Administrator (Admin) access is the key to the kingdom, and should be limited. Justin Gonzales, HCSS Enterprise Consulting Project Manager, is a specialist in building processes. His recommendation is that someone in operations who knows when employees are hired or let go should be the primary administrator for HCSS Credentials. The major function for the Admin is to add users, update profiles, and ensure those users have the right subscriptions to use the software. Depending on the company’s size and organization, this could be a good job for a lead payroll person, as they are in and out of the program quite a bit. Another person suited for this role is a job controls person or Project Manager.
2. If you are an Enterprise company, wait to create your User Profiles and Subscription Groups until after you have established your Business Units. This will save you time having to edit each user profile to the proper business unit afterwards.
3. After establishing your Admin, you will need to create Subscription Groups based on your business needs. Justin recommends deciding who should have access to which programs, and that will determine how many groups to create. For example: A company using both HCSS Field and Manager Mobile would want two separate subscription groups to manage each so your managers are not also paying for a field subscription. If you are beginning to use HCSS Safety, but do not want everyone to have access to Safety, you would want to a Subscription Group for HCSS Field users, and another Subscription Group for HCSS Field and Safety users. Each group you create should have a purpose to help you manage the function of employees using the software. Lewis Frey, HCSS Customer Engagement Manager, adds that “Subscription Groups need to be well-defined and descriptive.”
4. After you create your Subscription Groups, you would want to create User Profiles. Our system requires a unique User ID that is unique to the entire system, not just your company. For this reason, our users have found success with using email addresses as their User IDs.
5. Everyone should know their own password. One of the first steps each user should do when they receive their login information is to change their password to something they will remember, and is unique to them. Having one person maintain all the passwords could be a good idea for backup, but that kind of ownership to one person is not scalable. A better way to handle forgotten passwords, if the admin gets involved, is to reset the password and have the user change it when they get logged in.
6. We are constantly making improvement to the HCSS Credentials site to add more functionality and manageability. One function that was not in the system at the beginning was the ability to import and export your user lists. You can now import from an excel or .csv file with a first name, last name, email, and a note to create users in credentials. The ability to export your list is useful for auditing your users.
7. Credentials reports can help you audit your user list. Large companies may audit their user list quarterly, smaller companies usually audit their user list more frequently (monthly). One way to find users that are no longer using HCSS Field is to find out who is no longer sending in timecards. With this report, you can gauge who you would need to cut from the Subscription Group. If the user is active (and sending in timecards is part of their function), they should have a value close to the other users.
   • Go to Credentials Reports and open the Subscription Usage Report.
   • Select the date range you are auditing (monthly or quarterly depending on your needs), and run the report.
   • Click the drop down for “Report Options” and select Column Chooser
   • Drag “Time Card” and “Last Submitted Timecard” onto your report.
   • Frequency depends on your needs, and how often you would get benefit out of it.
8. The Audit Trail Report is another useful report for finding those account changes to user profiles, subscription groups, and billing. With this report, you can view the time, date and which user made the change when making an audit.
9. Delete users instead of re using them. There are not activation fees involved with deleting a user and creating a new one for a new employee. In the past, users would hold on to accounts until they needed to repurpose them to save on activation fees. There is no benefit to repurposing rather than creating a new and unique user without the fee, so the recommendation is to remove the clutter when that user is no longer necessary. Before removing a user, you should remove their subscription group access, and then inactive their account. Then you can add a new one when needed.
10. You don’t have to do this alone; Let us know how to we can help.
    • HCSS Support that is available to you every day, all the time.
    • We have a library of articles based on actual support calls that you can browse through at any time.
    • The HCSS Academy Learning Module is update regularly with new courses that can help you keep learning. *This requires login from a user that is set up in HCSS Credentials.
    • Our HCSS Customer Success Team is available to you to guide you to reaching your company goals with using HCSS software.