HR software that grows with you
Papaya HR handles the everyday — staff records, holiday, absence, right to work — and keeps going when you need approval workflows, custom reporting, document generation and fine-grained access control. Switch on only the modules you need, and add the rest as you grow. Built by people who have been making HR systems work since 1999.
Papaya HR is a complete HR system for UK employers. It keeps staff records, holiday, sickness, contracts and right-to-work documentation in one secure place, and adds approval workflows, custom reporting, document generation and payroll reporting as you need them. It works out of the box on day one and configures deeply enough to run HR for hundreds of employees. Everything is UK GDPR compliant and hosted in UK Azure data centres.
Who is it for?
UK employers of any size — from a small team with no HR specialist, to an established HR department running a full approvals process across several teams.
What does it cost?
You pay per employee, per month, for the modules you switch on. Tell us your team size and we'll put a quote together.
How quickly can I start?
Smaller teams are usually live within days. Larger rollouts take longer, and we'll help you plan it. You can explore the full system with your own data before you commit.
Who is behind it?
A UK company whose people have been building and implementing HR systems since 1999, including an enterprise HR platform used across the UK. More about us.
Depth when you need it
Three things every employer gets as standard, and six modules you switch on only when you need them. Nothing here is a different product.
Personal, employment, pay, pension and benefit details in one secure record, with right-to-work tracking, contracts, documents, self-service and a full audit trail.
Included as standard
Decide exactly who sees what, down to individual groups of fields across more than 40 areas of the employee record.
Included as standard
Your data sits in UK Azure data centres, encrypted at rest and in transit. Nothing to install, nothing to maintain.
Included as standard
Holiday requests and approvals, sickness records, UK bank holidays and a team calendar. Most businesses start here.
Optional module
Track DBS certificates, type and expiry, with reminders before they lapse.
Optional module
Build your own reports, mail-merge letters and contracts, create org charts and tailor your dashboards.
Optional module
Snapshot every pay period and see exactly what changed, before anything reaches your payroll provider or bureau.
Optional module
Design your own multi-step approvals and automatic reminders: who signs off what, in what order, and what happens next.
Optional module
Create your own roles and permissions, rename fields, add help text and tailor screens to how you actually work.
Optional module
Built around you
Secure records and right-to-work tracking are included as standard. Switch on absence, DBS checks, reporting, payroll reporting, workflows and custom roles as and when you need them — and switch them off again if you don't. Explore the full system before you commit.
See What's IncludedAbout Us
Papaya HR did not start as a blank sheet of paper. It started in 1999, and we have spent the years since on every side of HR technology — building it, deciding what went into it, demonstrating it, implementing it inside other organisations, and taking the call when it broke.
We are not a sales operation that happens to own a product, and we are not technologists building something clever for its own sake. Software has never been quicker to produce than it is now; judgement about what to build is the part that still has to be earned. Ours was.
Papaya Software Ltd has been building HR software in the UK since 2016. Papaya HR runs on web, mobile and Windows, and the same platform serves a ten-person team and a fully staffed HR department.
Building HR systems since 1999
Designed by people who have implemented them, not just built them.
UK GDPR compliant
Your employee data stays secure and compliant.
UK-based support
Real people, based in the UK, ready to help.
Scales without switching systems
One platform, whether you're ten people or a full HR function.
Take a proper look with your own data, or have us walk you through it first.
Contact
Prefer to talk it through? Ask us anything, or book a demo and we'll tailor it to the size and shape of your business.
If you employ people, you are expected to keep accurate records — contracts, holiday, sickness, right to work — and to protect their personal data under UK GDPR. Papaya HR keeps all of it in one secure place with a clear audit trail, so you can answer questions about who did what, and when, without digging through folders and inboxes. All data is stored in UK Azure data centres.
Papaya HR's Absence Management module handles holiday requests, sick leave, and TOIL in a single approval workflow — with full audit history and manager dashboards. Employees can request leave from the mobile app; managers approve or decline in seconds.
Yes. The optional Payroll reporting module snapshots every pay period so you can see exactly what changed, and sends clean data to your payroll provider.
No. Underneath the straightforward front end sits a properly configurable system: multi-step approval workflows you design yourself, role-based permissions covering more than 40 areas of the employee record, a report builder, mail-merged contracts and letters, org charts, shift patterns and period-by-period payroll reporting. It is used on web, mobile and Windows. If you want to see it at that scale, book a demo and we'll walk through the parts that matter to you.
That's the point of the module model. You start with secure records and right-to-work tracking, and switch on absence, workflows, reporting, custom roles and payroll reporting when you actually need them. It is the same system throughout, so growing does not mean a migration to something else.
Yes. All data is stored in UK Microsoft Azure data centres, encrypted at rest and in transit. Papaya HR is fully UK GDPR compliant. See our Privacy Notice for details.