The Landscape
An outsourced HR consultancy carries the people function for a portfolio of small and mid-sized businesses that have no HR team of their own. Each client arrives with its own setup. One runs BreatheHR, the next is on PeopleHR or Sage HR, a third keeps holiday on a spreadsheet and contracts in a filing cabinet. On top of that sits payroll, usually a separate system again, and the consultant keeps all of it straight across every account at once.
The work itself is advisory, but the day fills with administration. Absence requests forwarded by email, onboarding checklists kept per client, appraisal cycles chased by hand, the same starter details keyed into an HRIS and then again into payroll. As the client list grows, that manual layer grows with it, faster than the consultancy can bill for.
Common Challenges
- Employees emailing the consultancy for a payslip, a holiday balance, or a copy of their contract, because the client has no self-service portal to send them to
- Starter and leaver details rekeyed from the HRIS into payroll by hand, where one missed field turns into a pay error
- Onboarding run from a checklist in one person’s inbox, so a step is only as reliable as who remembers it
- Absence and holiday tracked differently for every client, some in the HRIS and some in a spreadsheet, with no single view of who is off
- Appraisal and probation dates that pass unnoticed until a client asks why nothing happened
- Headcount, turnover, and absence reported by exporting from each client’s system and stitching it together in Excel the night before the review
What We Build for HR Consultancies
A consultancy does not need to replace each client’s HRIS. It needs the systems around them to connect, so a change entered once does not get entered again in payroll a week later. We build employee self-service portals where staff check their own records, book holiday, log absence, and pull their own documents, so those requests stop reaching the consultant. Where the HRIS and payroll sit apart, we build the integration between them, so a starter or leaver entered once carries through both instead of being typed in twice.
On top of that we build the workflow tools that run the repeatable processes: onboarding sequences that trigger each task in order, absence flows that route a request to the right approver, and appraisal and probation cycles that raise their own reminders before a date slips. For the consultancy’s own oversight, a reporting dashboard pulls headcount, absence, turnover, and capacity across the client base into one place, so a quarterly people report is a screen to open rather than a spreadsheet to assemble.
We hold a firm line on scope. We build the software; the HR expertise stays with you. Employment-law advice, disciplinary and grievance decisions, and the judgment on a live case are your consultants’ work, not ours. What we take off the desk is the manual administration around that advice, the rekeying and chasing that eats time you could bill.
How We Work With HR Consultancies
HR and payroll data is about as sensitive as business data gets, and you handle it on behalf of clients who trust you with it. We build to match: role-based access so each client’s records stay separate, a clear record of who can see and change what, and portals that hold documents securely rather than scattering them across email. A project usually starts with the one process costing the most manual time, often the self-service portal or the HRIS-to-payroll link, then extends across the book once it proves itself.
We are not the right team for a consultancy that just wants an off-the-shelf HRIS. If BreatheHR or Sage HR already does the job, keep it. We come in where those tools stop and the manual workarounds begin, the same ground we cover for recruitment agencies and other professional services firms across our industries work. And if you are a newly-established consultancy rather than a scaled one, our free HR Consultancy Launch Programme walks you through the first ninety days.
Talk to Us About Your Consultancy
If your team spends more time moving people data between systems than advising clients on it, that gap is what we close. Get in touch to talk through the one process costing you the most, and what building it properly would look like.
