HR and payroll fail in the same place every time

Payroll errors are rarely arithmetic. The tax tables are right, the deduction rules are right, and the calculation runs correctly on the numbers it was given. The numbers it was given came from a spreadsheet somebody typed on Thursday afternoon from a different system’s report.

That is the gap. It is between the record of what happened and the run that pays for it, and closing it is worth more than any feature on either side.

The chain, with no export in it

The clock on the wall writes the attendance. Attendance and leave feed payroll directly. Payslips post to the accounts as they are paid. Employees check their own balances without emailing anybody.

Nothing in that chain is an export, which is the only reason nothing in it can disagree. Timesheets move draft → submitted → approved → locked, and stay locked once payroll has paid them, because a timesheet that can be edited after it was paid is a reconciliation problem waiting for an audit.

The time clock has no camera and no map

The shared wall device takes a badge or a PIN. It has an offline queue for when the network is not there. And it has no biometrics and no location tracking, by design.

That is a decision rather than a gap in the roadmap. Fingerprint and face data is biometric data under GDPR Article 9 and its equivalents elsewhere: a special category with a higher bar for lawful processing, a breach with no remedy (you cannot reissue somebody’s fingerprint) and a genuine question about whether consent from an employee to their employer is freely given at all.

Seven applications, and their real state

• HR. The employee master and the org structure: records, contracts, departments, teams, matrix reporting, lifecycle events, letters and issued assets.
• Employee Self-Service. One person’s own record: leave, attendance, schedule, payslips, expense claims, documents, assets, benefits, training and performance, plus somewhere to raise a grievance or report a safety incident, and a manager’s approval queue that appears only if the org chart says you manage anyone.
• Payroll. Pay runs created, previewed, processed and paid, with deduction rules, salary structures, statutory remittances, and the accrual split by cost centre.
• Time Clock. The shared wall device described above.
• Recruit. Requisitions, candidate pipeline, interviews and offers, plus the careers site candidates apply through. Available.
• Workforce. The operational week line managers run. Early access: capture, timesheets, the rota (patterns, open shifts, swaps and cover) and absence (cases, entitlements and policies) have shipped; one queue for every approval, and the analytics screen, are not built.
• Talent. Reviews, goals, 360 feedback and check-ins, plus a course catalogue, skills, development plans and succession. Early access.

Two of those seven carry an early-access label at the application level rather than only at the product level, and that distinction exists so a listing marked "available" never vouches for everything underneath it. An application that is newer than the rest, or still missing a screen, says so itself rather than borrowing the product’s label.

What a department costs, answerable

Payroll cost splits by cost centre, so a department can be asked what it spends on people and the answer comes from the pay run rather than from an allocation somebody maintains. It is a small thing that only works because payroll and the ledger are not separate purchases.

Priced per employee rather than per user, because an HR system where only HR has a login is a filing cabinet, and charging for the self-service seat is how a company ends up buying one.

Play the film

Added 30 October 2026: Rutba People on film, with an invented business.