Support

Manage email templates

admin Last updated 26 April 2026

The Comms module is where every email the platform sends to your employees lives — onboarding sequences, leave approvals, reference check requests, plus your own one-off and recurring sends. The foundation of all of this is email templates.

Open Comms

  1. On the left hand sidebar, under HR Hub, click Comms.

The Comms page has tabs for Templates, Send Email, Sent log, and Onboarding sequences. Templates is where this article focuses.

Master vs organisation templates

The platform ships with master templates for the standard communications (welcome to the platform, new starter day-one, performance review nudges, reference check requests, etc.). These templates carry a YHRTK badge and are maintained by the platform team.

You can use master templates as-is, or create organisation templates that override them with your own wording. Once you create an org template for a specific use case, the platform uses your version instead of the master.

This means you get sensible defaults out of the box, but full control over your team-facing tone when you want it.

Template categories

Templates are tagged by category so you can find the right one fast:

  • Onboarding (purple)
  • Probation (amber)
  • Performance (blue)
  • Anniversary (pink)
  • General (grey)
  • Offboarding (red)
  • Manual (grey) — for ad-hoc one-off sends
  • Workflow (purple) — sent by the workflow engine

Edit or create a template

  1. From the Templates tab, click into the template you want to edit (or click to create a new one).
  2. The slide-out panel opens with:
    • Subject line. What recipients see in their inbox.
    • Body. The email content. Toggle between Visual (rich-text editor) and HTML (raw HTML) modes depending on what you prefer.
    • Merge tags. Click any tag to insert it into the subject or body where the cursor is.
  3. Save.

If you’re editing a master template, the platform creates a copy as an org template so the master stays untouched. Your org version is now what’s used.

Merge tags available

Common merge tags include:

  • {{employee_name}} — recipient’s name
  • {{first_name}} — recipient’s first name
  • {{org_name}} — your organisation’s name
  • {{manager_name}} — recipient’s manager
  • {{start_date}} — employee start date (where relevant)
  • {{set_password_url}} — for invite emails

The full list shows in the editor as clickable chips. Click any chip to insert it.

Preview before saving

The editor has a preview pane that fills in merge tags with sample data. Always preview before saving, easy to spot a missing tag or a formatting issue this way.

Sanitisation and HTML safety

The platform sanitises the HTML in your templates before sending, removing anything that could be unsafe (scripts, dangerous attributes). You can paste in HTML from elsewhere, but anything unsafe will be stripped. This protects your recipients from accidentally embedded tracking pixels or scripts.

Permissions

Editing templates is org admin only. Managers and employees use the templates indirectly via the workflow engine and the Send Email flow, but can’t change them.