Answer a short form about your business — restaurant, salon, retail, trades, cleaning, landscaping, auto shop, front office, childcare, nonprofit or gym. HandbookHQ writes a complete, plain-English handbook around your answers, with a signature page ready for your next hire.
Most disputes with staff start with an unwritten rule. A handbook everyone signs turns "I didn't know" into a shared standard for call-outs, breaks, tips, dress and phones.
Employment-practices insurance applications, SBA lenders and payroll providers increasingly ask whether you have a written handbook with an anti-harassment policy and signed acknowledgements.
Hand a new employee a real handbook on day one and onboarding takes an hour instead of a week of "ask Maria". It also makes you look like the employer people want to stay with.
You know your business. We know what a handbook needs to say. The form takes about five minutes.
Name, type, state, headcount, hourly or salaried, tipped staff, minors, PTO approach, benefits, dress code, scheduling, drug policy strictness, and anything unique about how you run things.
Core covers the fourteen essentials. Complete adds industry sections, cash handling, vehicles, social media, harassment training and more. Pay by card through Stripe.
Sections appear as they are written. Download for Word to review the highlighted facts and edit, print to PDF with a table of contents and page breaks, and print the acknowledgement page on its own.
An excerpt from the Attendance, Punctuality & Scheduling section generated for a 12-person café in Vermont.
A café runs on a handful of people showing up when they said they would. When one person is late for a Saturday open, the line backs up, the kitchen falls behind, and a coworker who came in on time carries the difference. Maple Street Café treats reliability as a core part of every job, and we try to make the rules simple and fair.
We post the schedule on the staff board and in the scheduling app by Wednesday evening for the week beginning the following Monday. Check it before you leave each shift. If you have a standing conflict — a class, a second job, childcare — tell the manager in writing and we will build the schedule around it wherever we can. Requests for specific days off should be in the app at least two weeks ahead; we cannot promise every request during holiday weeks and leaf season.
Missing a shift without contacting the manager is a no-call, no-show. The first one results in a written warning. A second within twelve months may result in termination. Two consecutive no-call, no-shows are treated as job abandonment and a voluntary resignation, unless you were physically unable to reach us.
You are late if you are not clocked in and ready to work at your scheduled start time. Being a few minutes late once in a while happens to everyone; a pattern of lateness is handled through our standards-of-conduct process. …
Every section runs 400–900 words, uses your business name, and is written in "we" and "you" — not legalese.
Every handbook starts with a cover page, table of contents and a signed acknowledgement page. The section list adapts to your type of business and your answers.
An HR consultant charges $1,500 and up for a handbook. Payroll-company add-ons run $30–$50 a month whether you touch them or not. HandbookHQ is a one-time purchase with an optional yearly refresh.
14-day money-back guarantee if the handbook is unusable for your business. Secure checkout by Stripe.
If you have employees, you already have policies — they are just unwritten, remembered differently by everyone, and enforced unevenly. The first time you write up one server for being late and not another, or one technician gets paid for drive time and another does not, the missing handbook turns into a real problem. A handbook is not about bureaucracy. It is the document that lets a five-person salon or a twenty-person landscaping crew run the same way whether or not the owner is standing there.
Whatever the industry, a handbook needs the same backbone. A welcome letter that sets the tone. A short at-will and equal opportunity statement so nobody mistakes the handbook for a contract. An anti-harassment policy with a real reporting path — at least two people an employee can go to, a promise to investigate, and a clear anti-retaliation statement; several states now require this in writing. Pay and timekeeping rules that stop off-the-clock work. Attendance rules with a specific call-out procedure. A paid time off policy that matches what you actually do, whether that is accrual, a lump sum each year, or nothing beyond what the state requires. Standards of conduct with a discipline process the business can skip when it needs to. Safety and injury reporting. And an acknowledgement page that every employee signs.
A generic handbook fails small businesses precisely where they are most exposed. A restaurant needs tip-pooling and tip-reporting language, food-safety and illness-exclusion rules, and alcohol-service expectations. A salon needs sanitation and licensing sections and a clear line between employees and booth renters. Retail needs cash handling and loss prevention that tells staff never to physically stop a shoplifter. Contractors, landscapers and cleaners need company-vehicle rules, job-site or client-home conduct, key and alarm-code custody, and chemical or equipment safety. A dental or medical front office needs patient-privacy expectations for non-clinical staff. Childcare centers need supervision, release-of-children and mandated-reporter policies. HandbookHQ builds these sections in when you pick your business type, and leaves them out when they do not apply.
Meal and rest breaks, paid sick leave, final-paycheck timing, hours limits for minors, marijuana testing, wage-discussion protections, and required harassment training all vary by state and often by city. A handbook that states a specific number for one state is wrong in the next, and the numbers change. That is why HandbookHQ describes the practice — you get an unpaid, duty-free meal period on longer shifts; final pay is issued as state law requires — and tells you exactly where to confirm the current rule. It is also why the handbook says, on the cover and in the acknowledgement, that it is a starting point to be reviewed by an attorney or HR professional in your state before use.
Read the whole handbook and change anything that does not match reality; a rule you will not enforce is worse than no rule. Have it reviewed. Set an effective date two to four weeks out, hand it to every employee, walk through the parts that changed at a staff meeting, and collect signed acknowledgement pages into personnel files. Give new hires the handbook on day one and have them sign within their first week. Review it once a year — or pick the Annual Refresh and we will remind you and regenerate it.
No — HandbookHQ is not a law firm and the handbook is not legal advice. It is a professionally structured draft written around your answers. Employment law differs by state and city and changes every year, so wherever a rule is state-specific (break minutes, sick-leave accrual, final-paycheck timing, rules for minors) the handbook describes the practice and tells you to confirm the current requirement with your state labor department. Have an employment attorney or HR professional review it before you hand it out.
A template is written for nobody in particular and leaves you to fill in fifty blanks. HandbookHQ writes each section around your business — the name, the type of work, your state, whether you have tipped staff or minors, your PTO approach, your dress code, how you schedule — so a café gets food-safety and tip-pooling language and a plumbing company gets vehicle and job-site rules instead.
Sections are written one at a time and appear on your handbook page as each one finishes. A Core Handbook usually takes five to ten minutes; a Complete Handbook ten to fifteen. You can close the page — we email you the permanent link.
Yes — that is the point. Your handbook arrives as a formatted document you can open in Microsoft Word (or Google Docs), with every business-specific fact highlighted for review. Check each highlight, edit anything that does not match how you actually run the business, then save, print and hand it out. The online copy also stays available at your private link, ready to print as a PDF.
Policies drift and laws change. With Complete + Annual Refresh, twelve months after your purchase we email a one-click link that regenerates the whole handbook from your current inputs (you can update headcount, owner name or notes first). It is $39 per year after the first year and you can cancel any time.
Yes — a signed acknowledgement is the single most useful page in the handbook if you ever need to show an employee was told the rules. Every handbook includes one, and it has its own print page so you can hand it out separately.
If you tell us you have tipped staff, the handbook adds a tip pooling and tip reporting section. Employ anyone under 18 and it adds an Employment of Minors section. Trades, landscaping, cleaning and auto shops automatically get a company-vehicle section; cleaning, landscaping and contractors get client-home and job-site conduct.
If the handbook is unusable for your business, email us within 14 days and we will refund you in full. Most issues can be fixed faster by regenerating with adjusted answers — just ask.
Five minutes of questions, one payment, a handbook written for your business — with the signature page ready to print.
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