Case study · HR software
An HR system that bends to the company, not the other way round
Collaborative Insight Technologies needed a web-based HR management system that would scale, adapt to how each organisation actually works, and treat employee data with the seriousness it deserves. We built it over a two-year engagement.
Engagement · Build & scaling
A two-year build of a configurable, multi-organisation HR system.
- Industry
- HR & workforce software
- Solution
- Web-based HRM system
- Engagement model
- Dedicated product team
- Engagement length
- 2 years (Jul 2020 – Jun 2022)
- Market stage
- Product build & scaling
- Client
- Collaborative Insight Technologies, London
- Scope
- Custom software development
- Platform
- Web application
Outcomes
What the client asked for, and what the system guarantees
Their published review names three things: scalable functionality, personalised features and robust security. These are how each was met.
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80%
Less administrative load on HR teams
Employees update their own details, book their own leave and find their own documents, which is where most of an HR inbox used to come from.
Reported by organisations using the system
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90%
Faster onboarding of a new organisation
A company with different approval chains and leave rules is configured rather than developed for, turning a project into a setup task.
Configuration compared with custom development per client
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100%
Of employee data access recorded
Every read of an employee record is attributable to a person and a moment, which is what lets a company answer for its most sensitive data.
By design: access logging in the data layer
Context
The situation before the system
Why HR products are hard to sell twice.
The business
Collaborative Insight Technologies, a London software company building a web-based HR management system for organisations to run their workforce on.
The starting point
HR software typically gets built around one organisation's way of working, sold to a second, and bent out of shape until it serves neither properly.
The trigger
Approval chains, leave rules, probation, review cycles and job structures differ at every company — and each one believes its version is the obvious one.
What they wanted
A system configured rather than rewritten: one codebase serving organisations with genuinely different processes, holding employee data securely enough that a company would put its whole workforce in it.
Constraints
Employee data is among the most sensitive a company holds · approval chains and leave rules differ at every organisation · most users open it rarely, so nothing can require training · payroll and compliance dates are unforgiving.
System
What it runs at today
The system as delivered.
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3
User types
HR staff, managers and employees, each with their own view of the same records
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1
Codebase, many configurations
Different approval chains and leave rules without branching the code
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5.0
Client rating
Rated by the client in a verified review published on Clutch
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0
Shared data between organisations
Each organisation's records isolated from every other
The engineering problem
Four problems that decided the product
Each of these is a decision that is cheap at the start of an HR build and close to impossible later.
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Build for one company and you cannot sell to the second
The tempting path is to implement the first client's process and generalise later. Generalising later means unpicking assumptions that have spread through the whole system, and it is the decision that makes HR products expensive to sell.
What we did
The configuration layer was built before any feature. Anything that varies between organisations — approvals, leave rules, job structures — is data, so a new client is set up rather than developed for.
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Employee data raises the stakes on every mistake
Salaries, disciplinary records, health-related absence. A permissions bug in most software is embarrassing; here it is a serious incident involving people who never chose to use the product.
What we did
Permissions and access recording built into the foundations, with each organisation's data isolated so there is no path by which one company could reach another's records.
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Most users visit twice a year and will not learn anything
HR staff use the system daily. Everyone else books leave in January and checks a document in November. A design that assumes familiarity fails the majority of its users every time.
What we did
Self-service designed for someone who has forgotten everything: the common tasks reachable immediately, nothing requiring training, and no assumed memory of a previous visit.
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Leave rules are far more varied than they first appear
Entitlement, accrual, carry-over, part-year joiners, public holidays that differ by location, approval that skips a level when someone is away. Every organisation has its own answers and considers them standard.
What we did
A leave rule engine covering entitlement, accrual and carry-over as configuration, with approval routed by the organisation's own chain rather than a fixed hierarchy.
Architecture
How it fits together
Simplified — the shape of the system rather than every service in it.
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Application
- Web application
- Role-based interfaces
- Self-service portal
One application presenting HR, manager and employee views over the same records, each showing only what that role needs to act.
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Configuration layer
- Workflow engine
- Leave rule engine
- Organisation settings
The part built first: everything that varies between organisations expressed as configuration, which is what makes onboarding a setup task.
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Access & security
- Authentication
- Role permissions
- Access logging
- Organisation isolation
Every read and write passes an access layer that checks the role, scopes to the organisation and records the access before returning anything.
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Data & infrastructure
- Encrypted storage
- Automated backups
- Cloud hosting
- Release process
Employee data encrypted at rest, with backups and updates handled centrally rather than by the companies using the product.
Building the configuration layer before the first feature is the decision this product rests on. It is also the decision almost nobody makes, because it produces nothing demonstrable for the first several weeks.
Solutions
One system, configured per organisation
The engineering effort went into configurability. Anything that varies between companies is data, not code.
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Employee records
A single record per employee — role, history, documents, contract details — structured so HR sees everything and a manager sees only what they should.
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Leave and absence
Leave types, entitlements, accrual and carry-over defined per organisation, with approval routed by the company's own chain rather than a fixed one.
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Configurable workflows
Onboarding, probation, reviews and approvals built as configurable steps, so a new client is set up rather than developed for.
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Security and access
Role-based access to employee data, access recorded, and the separation between HR, management and self-service enforced on the server.
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Self-service
Employees update their own details, book leave and find their documents without emailing HR, which is where most of HR's day used to go.
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Reporting
Headcount, absence and process reporting from live data, so HR stops rebuilding the same spreadsheet every month.
Key capabilities
What it does day to day
Six capabilities across the workforce.
| Capability | Runs | Refresh | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee records | HR | Continuous | Role, history, documents and contract details on one record per employee |
| Leave & absence | Employee | On request | Leave types, entitlement, accrual and carry-over configured per organisation |
| Configurable workflows | Admin | On setup | Onboarding, probation, reviews and approvals as configurable steps |
| Self-service | Employee | On demand | Update details, book leave and find documents without emailing HR |
| Access control | Admin | Continuous | Role-based access to employee data, with every access recorded |
| Reporting | HR | On demand | Headcount, absence and process reporting from live data rather than a monthly spreadsheet |
Integrations
How the moving parts plug in
Every organisation runs its own processes on the same application, isolated from each other.
Organisations
- Approval chainsDifferent at every company
- Leave rulesEntitlement, accrual, carry-over
- Job structuresGrades, roles, reporting lines
Configuration & access layer
- Workflow engineProcesses as data
- Organisation isolationNo path between tenants
- Access loggingRecorded before data is returned
Core records
- Employee records
- Leave & absence
- Documents
- Reporting
Because the workflow engine sits between the organisation and the records, a company changing its approval chain is a configuration change rather than a release — which is what keeps a multi-tenant HR product maintainable.
Security & data
What protects employee data
The client's own review names robust security as one of three things delivered. This is what that meant in practice.
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Organisation isolation
Each organisation's records are scoped so there is no route, accidental or otherwise, from one company's data to another's.
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Recorded access
Reading an employee record is attributable to a person and a moment, so a company can answer who saw a salary or an absence record.
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Encryption and backups
Employee data encrypted at rest with automated backups, neither of which the customer organisations have to manage.
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Server-side permissions
What a role may do is enforced in the access layer. The interface reflects permissions; it never defines them.
The brief
Every company thinks its HR process is normal, and none of them match
HR software fails in a predictable way. It is built around one organisation's way of doing things, sold to a second, and then bent out of shape until it serves neither. Approval chains, leave rules, probation, review cycles and job structures differ at every company, and all of them believe their version is the obvious one.
The brief was a system that could be configured rather than rewritten — one codebase serving organisations with genuinely different processes, holding employee data securely enough that a company would be comfortable putting its whole workforce in it.
- Configurable processes instead of hard-coded assumptions
- Employee records held securely, with access recorded
- Room to grow without re-architecting
- Usable by HR staff, managers and employees alike
What HR software must not get wrong
- 01Employee data is among the most sensitive a company holds
- 02Approval chains and leave rules differ at every organisation
- 03Most users open it rarely, so nothing can require training
- 04Payroll and compliance dates are unforgiving
Process
We built the configuration layer before the features
It is tempting to build one company's process first and generalise later. That is the decision that makes HR products expensive to sell.
-
Modelling the variation
We mapped how approvals, leave and job structures differ between organisations, and turned the differences into configuration rather than branches in the code.
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Security foundations
The permission model and access recording were built first, because retrofitting them onto an HR product is close to impossible.
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Core records and leave
Employee records and absence built against the configuration layer, proving it against genuinely different rule sets.
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Self-service and reporting
The employee-facing side and reporting, both designed for people who use the system rarely and want to leave quickly.
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Scale and hardening
Performance with realistic workforce sizes, and the security review the product needed before companies would trust it with staff data.
Technology
A configurable multi-organisation web application
One application serving many organisations, each with its own rules, its own data and no way to reach anyone else's.
Application
- Web application
- Role-based interfaces
- Self-service portal
Configuration
- Workflow engine
- Leave rule engine
- Organisation settings
Data and security
- Isolated organisation data
- Encrypted storage
- Access logging
- Session control
Operations
- Cloud hosting
- Backups
- Monitoring
- Release process
Business impact
What it changed for the client
Three consequences of configuring rather than customising.
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A sellable product
Onboarding a new organisation is a setup task, so growth does not require a development project per customer.
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Trustworthy with staff data
Isolation and recorded access are what let a company put its whole workforce into someone else's system.
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HR stops being a helpdesk
Self-service designed for infrequent users means the routine questions stop arriving in HR's inbox.
The result
Scalable, configurable and secure — in the client's own words
The system serves organisations with different approval chains, leave rules and job structures from one codebase, with employee data isolated per organisation and access recorded.
The client's published review names the three things the brief asked for: scalable functionality, personalised features and robust security. That is their assessment, not ours.
- One codebase serving genuinely different HR processes
- Configuration instead of custom development per client
- Employee data isolated, with access recorded
- 5.0 rating in a verified Clutch review
What we would repeat on workforce software
- 01Build the configuration layer before the first feature
- 02Permissions and access logging belong in the foundations
- 03Design self-service for someone who visits twice a year
- 04Make onboarding a new organisation a setup task, not a project
Client review
What the client said about the work
Published on Clutch, where the client is verified and we cannot edit or remove what they write.
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Custom Software Development
Web-Based HRM System Development
Silver Scintilla provided the best solution with scalable functionality, personalized features, and robust security.
Suheb Khan
Director, Collaborative Insight Technologies Jul 2020 – Jun 2022
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