HR and people teams
For the owner or office manager who looks after people on top of their real job, in a business of ten to fifty where HR is a spreadsheet, a shared inbox and a calendar somebody remembers to update.
What we hear
Leave booked by email.
Requests arrive in an inbox, get a yes in a reply, and no two calendars agree on who is away.
Personal records in a spreadsheet everyone can open.
Salaries, addresses and notes in one sheet, shared wider than anyone meant.
Contracts in a folder somewhere.
Which version did they sign, and did they sign it at all?
Approvals with no record.
Pay runs, contractor invoices and pay rises agreed in a message, with nothing to show later who said yes.
We are building Sonola
Sonola is our own HR product for teams of ten to fifty: people, time off, pay and documents in one place that works on a phone. We are building it now, and it is not released yet.
The parts we have already built
Most HR work is approvals and records, and we have built both for other jobs.
- Approvals that mean something. In the sign-off portal we built for The Creative Clan, approving opens a confirmation that names the job and says what approving means, the approval is stamped with the name and the date, the next step happens on its own, and a finished month is locked so nothing is approved twice.
- Records that cannot be quietly changed. In Bhala, our markbook for schools, every mark is append-only and the database enforces it, each school's data is kept apart by the database itself, and the screen says plainly which sensitive records may never be used.
Where we would start
With the approval that goes through your inbox most often, usually time off or contractor invoices. One place to ask, one place to say yes, a record of who said it and when, and the calendar updated on its own. It sits next to the payroll and accounting you already use rather than replacing them.
The work behind this page
- Case studyThe Creative ClanA client review and sign-off portal. Their client opens a board, sees what is waiting on a decision, signs it off, and the work moves to invoicing. Live.Read the case study
- Case studyBhalaA markbook platform for South African schools. Marks are append-only and the database enforces it, absences are never scored, and mark entry works offline. Live since October 2026.Read the case study
How we usually help
Tell us the job that still gets done by hand. We will tell you on the first call whether it is worth building.