Malama is Gohoku's own HR software, built and supported by our Honolulu team. Mālama is the Hawaiian word for taking care of something, and that is the job: one careful record of the people who work for you. Malama holds your employee directory, a time clock, vacation and sick leave, performance reviews and confidential incident files in one place, with strict rules about who may see what. It is made for the Hawaii employer who has outgrown spreadsheets and a filing cabinet but does not need, or want to pay for, a mainland enterprise HR suite.
Names, contact details, department, job title, manager, hire date and status, searchable from any screen. A change of department, title or manager is saved as a dated history line instead of overwriting the old value, so you can still answer who someone reported to last March.
A position is a seat, not a person. When someone leaves, the seat stays on the books and shows as vacant, so you always know your real headcount and what is open. Ending someone's employment vacates their position and switches off their login in the same step.
Employees clock in, out and for meals from their own sign-in, on a computer or a phone. The server sets the time, not the device. A board shows who is in, on a meal or away. A missed punch is added by a manager with a written reason, under the manager's name, and the employee is told.
A manager confirms each week, which turns the clock and the schedule into a record. Malama shows hours worked and hours paid as two separate totals, because overtime is counted on hours actually worked and a paid vacation day is not one of them. Corrections are added as new lines with a reason; the original stays readable.
Leave is earned by the month, by the year or by the hour worked, with caps, waiting periods and carry-over limits. Every balance is the sum of a ledger you can read line by line: earned, taken, adjusted, forfeited. Half days stay half days, because leave is kept in hours.
Put salaried staff, hourly staff and each bargaining unit in its own group with its own leave rules and service tiers. A new handbook or a new agreement becomes a new dated version; past accruals are never rewritten. One screen explains exactly why a person is on the rate they are on.
Employees request leave against their real balance, and two requests on the same afternoon cannot both spend the same hours. Managers approve from a queue and see the team on a timeline. Co-workers see only that someone is out, never why, and managers can be kept from seeing the kind of leave at all.
Run review cycles with a self-assessment, a manager assessment, ratings on your own competencies and goals that carry from one cycle to the next. A draft stays private until the manager shares it. The employee acknowledges it, can add a written response, and the review is then locked.
Write down what happened, who was involved and in what role, and attach statements, photos and e-mails. Notes are added to a timeline, each with its author and date, and can be corrected but never quietly edited or deleted. Follow-up actions have an owner and a due date, and overdue ones rise to the top of the dashboard.
Five fixed roles: HR admin, HR staff, manager, employee and auditor. A sensitive incident is open only to the people named on it, whatever the org chart says, so a complaint about a manager never reaches that manager. Every time someone opens an incident, it is logged.
It replaces the spreadsheet of employees, the paper time cards, the vacation calendar on the wall and the folder of write-ups with one system that keeps them consistent. In Malama a person is entered once, and their hours, leave balance, reviews and position all hang off that one record. The practical gain is that questions get an answer you can show someone: how much sick leave is left, who approved the time off, what was said in the last review, and who has read a confidential file.
No. Malama does not calculate pay, withhold tax, file returns or pay anyone, and we would rather say so here than in a sales call. It keeps the records a pay run starts from: confirmed hours for each week, split into worked and paid, and leave taken. Pay itself stays with your payroll service or accountant.
Each employee signs in to Malama in a web browser and presses clock in, start meal, end meal or clock out. The time comes from the server, so changing the clock on a phone does nothing. Punches are never edited: a wrong one is struck through and replaced, and both stay visible. A shift someone forgot to close is flagged for a manager instead of being closed automatically, because inventing an end time is inventing somebody's pay. Malama does not track location or take photos.
Yes. You set how each kind of leave is earned, per month, per year or per hour worked, with waiting periods, caps and how much carries into the next year. Malama posts the accruals itself and never posts the same period twice. Leave an employee has requested but not yet had approved is held against the balance, and when someone leaves the company their remaining leave is settled in hours for your payroll service to pay out.
Yes. Employees are placed in groups, and each group has its own leave rules, so the people covered by a collective bargaining agreement follow that agreement while everyone else follows the handbook. When an agreement is renegotiated you add a new version from its effective date. Malama records which unit covers a job, never whether a person is a union member.
Only the people who should. Access depends on the confidentiality level of the incident, the reader's role and whether they have been named on that file, not on who reports to whom. Someone without access is not told that a file exists, and counts on the dashboard include only what that person may open. Each time an incident is opened, Malama logs who opened it and when, and HR can read that log.
Not quietly. Incident notes, time punches, leave entries and confirmed hours are append-only: a correction is a new entry that points at the one it corrects, with a name and a date on it, and the original stays readable. Employees are marked as terminated, not deleted. An incident can be placed on legal hold so it is marked to be kept. That is what makes a record worth something if it is ever disputed.
In an installation that is yours alone, with its own database, not in a shared system alongside other companies. Gohoku can host it for you or install it on a server in your own office, and either way we set up the backups. Passwords are chosen by each person through a one-time invitation link, so nobody, including your administrator and Gohoku, ever knows them.
Yes. Malama imports employees from a spreadsheet saved as a CSV file. The upload is checked first and you are shown, row by row, what would happen and what is wrong. Nothing is saved until you confirm, and the import then goes in completely or not at all. Gohoku does the first import with you as part of setup.
Yes. Malama is a web site that rearranges itself for a phone, a tablet or a desktop, with a light and a dark appearance, so there is nothing to install and nothing to keep updated. An employee can clock in, check a leave balance or request a day off from the phone in their pocket.
A spreadsheet has no memory. Change a cell and the old value is gone, along with any proof of who changed it. The vacation balance is whatever the last person typed. The write-up is in a drawer, or in one manager's e-mail, and nobody can say who has read it. None of that matters until the day a decision is questioned, and then it is the only thing that matters. Malama is built for that day: every entry has a name and a date, nothing is overwritten, and every balance can be traced to the lines that produced it.
Names like Kaʻiulani and Kūhiō are stored and shown with their ʻokina and kahakō. The holiday calendar is yours to set, so Prince Kūhiō Day, King Kamehameha I Day and Statehood Day sit beside the federal holidays. Hawaii has one of the highest rates of union membership in the country, and Malama keeps a separate, dated set of rules for each bargaining unit. Hawaii's Prepaid Health Care Act looks at whether someone works 20 hours a week for four weeks in a row, so a confirmed record of weekly hours matters more here than in most states. Malama keeps that record. It does not decide who is eligible for anything, and it is not legal advice.
Malama fits employers with roughly ten to a few hundred people and no large HR department: retail stores, restaurants and food service, medical and dental offices, non-profits, contractors, property managers and professional offices. It suits an office manager who is also the HR department as well as it suits a full HR team.
Ask us for a demo and we will walk through a week in Malama: a clock-in, a leave request and its approval, a review being shared, and an incident file with its access log. If your business needs something Malama does not do yet, the people who wrote it also do custom software development. Call 888-815-0038 or contact Gohoku.
