Can employees submit their own timesheets and leave?

Yes. Employees linked to a user account record time and request absence themselves, and see only their own records.

Does payroll post to the accounts automatically?

Yes, and dimensioned. Salary and employer contributions are attributed to cost centres using the same rules the budget engine applies.

Do I have to run payroll in Softbooq?

No. You can record what an external provider produced and still get the ledger postings, the cost analysis and the payslips.

What does "fully-loaded cost" include?

Gross pay, employer social, pension and health contributions, and reimbursed expenses that have been paid. The employer burden is the difference between salary and cost.

What happens when an approver is on leave?

Authority can be delegated for a period, so requests do not queue behind the one person who is away.

Can I produce everything held about one employee?

Yes, in one pass - for a handover, a manager query, or a subject access request.

People & Payroll

Softbooq Pro

Labour is your largest cost. It should appear in the accounts like one.

People here are not a filing cabinet bolted onto the side. The same employee record drives payroll, project cost, billable time, budgets and approvals - so what a person costs, what they earned you, and who signed off their leave are all answerable from one place.

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An unretouched screenshot from a live workspace.

Payroll that reaches the ledger properly

Running payroll is the easy half. Getting it into the accounts so it can be analysed is where most systems stop.

Run it here, or keep your provider

Calculate payroll internally, or record what an external provider produced. Either way the ledger, the cost analysis and the payslips come out the same, so switching provider is not a migration.

Salary attributed to the cost centre that earned it

Payroll posts dimensioned, not as two undimensioned debits. Attribution falls back through the time block, then the time entry, then the employee, then an undimensioned bucket - the same order the budget engine uses, so the ledger and the budget agree.

An overtime hour carries more of the cost

Allocation weights each block by hours multiplied by its premium rate, not by raw hours. An hour that costs the employer more should pull more of that person's gross onto the cost centre that caused it.

Deductions and bonuses as first-class items

Recurring deductions and one-off bonuses defined per employee and applied by the run, rather than adjusted by hand into a gross figure nobody can later explain.

What you owe the authorities, separated out

The tax and social contributions withheld are tracked as a remittance obligation rather than left inside one net payroll number to be untangled at filing time.

Payslips delivered, not printed and handed over

A payslip PDF per person per period, filed against the employee and reachable by them, so the request "can you resend my March payslip" stops being a task.

What a person actually costs

Salary is not cost. The gap between them is the employer burden, and it is the number that decides whether a project or a rate is profitable.

Fully-loaded cost per employee

Gross pay, plus the employer-side social, pension and health burden, plus reimbursed expenses that have actually been paid. That burden is the difference between salary and cost, and including it is what makes the figure honest.

Cost per person, visible as a screen

The number exists per employee rather than buried inside one cost centre's budget calculation, so you can compare people, roles and teams without exporting anything.

Billable hours against that cost

What was recorded as billable, by person and by project, set against what the person costs. Utilisation stops being a feeling.

Time, leave and who is actually here

Absence is only a problem when it is invisible until the morning it happens.

Attendance and time against projects

Clock in and out, or record time in blocks against a project and cost centre. Approved billable time becomes an invoice line without being typed a second time.

An absence calendar for the whole team

Who is off and when, across the team, so two people booking the same week is a conversation in advance rather than a discovery on the day.

Public holidays that match where people are

Holiday calendars configured per location, because a team spread across countries does not share a calendar and pretending otherwise breaks every capacity plan.

The org chart as a real structure

Reporting lines that the approval engine actually uses, rather than a diagram maintained separately and true only on the day it was drawn.

Approvals that survive someone being away

Most approval systems work until the approver is on the leave they were meant to approve.

Chains defined per request type

Who approves what, in what order, with stages that can require several people rather than whoever happens to open it first.

Delegation, so nothing waits two weeks

An approver who is away hands their authority to someone else for a period. Without this, a leave request sits behind the one person who cannot answer it.

Leave approval that posts to the leave ledger

An approved request draws down the right leave category rather than a generic counter, and refuses to post against a category it cannot resolve instead of writing a bad reference.

Joining, leaving, and the records in between

The two days that generate the most administrative risk are someone's first and last.

Onboarding as a checklist that exists

A template per role turned into assigned tasks, so equipment, accounts and paperwork are tracked rather than remembered by whoever hired them.

Offboarding that revokes and hands over

Access revoked, assets returned, work handed over, on a template rather than improvised the week someone leaves. The gap between a last day and a revoked login is a real exposure.

Everything held about one person, in one pass

Assemble the complete record for a handover, a manager question, or a subject access request - instead of opening eight screens and copying.

Import your existing people

Bring employees in from a spreadsheet or from your existing user accounts, so adopting the module is not a week of typing.

The details that took the longest

Small decisions you only make after getting them wrong.

Every one of these is a specific behaviour, chosen for a specific reason. They are the difference between software that demos well and software that survives a year of month-ends.

Payroll used to be invisible to the dimension engine

It posted as two undimensioned debits, so a dimensional profit and loss showed zero labour against every cost centre - the largest expense in a services business, missing from the analysis it most needed to be in. Attribution now follows the same fallback order the budget engine uses, so the ledger and the budget cannot tell different stories.

Cost includes the employer burden, because that is what cost means

Gross pay plus employer social, pension and health contributions plus paid reimbursements. A per-employee figure that reports only salary understates the real number by the exact amount that decides whether a billing rate works.

A subject access request should be spent reviewing, not gathering

The regulation gives 30 days. Filing the request creates a ticket with a due date, but somebody still has to collect from every table keyed to that employee. Assembling it in one pass means the month is spent checking what goes out rather than hunting for it.

An unresolvable leave category is skipped, not guessed

If an approved request names a leave type that does not match a category, the ledger post is skipped rather than written with an invalid reference. A leave balance that is wrong is worse than one that is briefly missing, because nobody goes looking for it.

Nothing is an island

What reaches HR without anyone typing it again.

Every one of these is a real data path, not a promise of "full integration".

Finance

Payroll posts with its cost-centre split

Projects

Hours and rates become project cost and billable time

Travel

Expense reports and reimbursements attach to the employee

Compliance

Policy acknowledgements are tracked per person

Public Portal

Open roles publish to your careers page

Assets

Equipment is assigned to a named custodian

Before you ask

Questions people ask about HR.

Can employees submit their own timesheets and leave?: Yes. Employees linked to a user account record time and request absence themselves, and see only their own records.
Does payroll post to the accounts automatically?: Yes, and dimensioned. Salary and employer contributions are attributed to cost centres using the same rules the budget engine applies.
Do I have to run payroll in Softbooq?: No. You can record what an external provider produced and still get the ledger postings, the cost analysis and the payslips.
What does "fully-loaded cost" include?: Gross pay, employer social, pension and health contributions, and reimbursed expenses that have been paid. The employer burden is the difference between salary and cost.
What happens when an approver is on leave?: Authority can be delegated for a period, so requests do not queue behind the one person who is away.
Can I produce everything held about one employee?: Yes, in one pass - for a handover, a manager query, or a subject access request.