An HR portal shaped around your organisation

What is an HR portal?

An HR portal is a secure, logged in system where employees, managers and HR handle everyday people tasks themselves: booking holiday, reporting sickness, claiming expenses, finding a policy or updating their details, instead of sending emails and spreadsheets back and forth.

A good HR portal gives each person the view their role needs:

• Employees see their own holiday balance, payslip questions, documents, training and objectives
• Line managers approve requests, see who is off, hold return to work chats and run reviews for their team
• HR gets the whole picture: records, cases, onboarding, compliance and reports
• Payroll and directors see the figures they need, and nothing they should not

It is the staff facing cousin of a customer portal: the same secure logins and permissions, pointed at your own people.

Try our live HR portal demo

The quickest way to judge HR software is to use it, so we built one you can try now at hr-demo.varsuite.co.uk.

The demo is a complete HR portal for Northbridge Group, a sample UK company with 81 people across Manchester, Glasgow and Belfast and a year of realistic history. You can sign in as:

• an HR manager, with leave to approve, cases to run, compliance to check and reports to read
• a line manager, with a team calendar, reviews to write and a sickness return to work due
• an employee, booking holiday, asking HR a question and planning family leave
• payroll and a director, each with their own figures and permissions
• a new starter who joins next Monday and sees only their welcome portal until then

Every visitor gets their own private copy, so nothing you change affects anyone else, and you can reset it whenever you like. Each role has a short guided tour, and two factor sign in is switched on, with the demo code shown on screen.

What does the HR portal include?

The portal is built from modules, so each organisation switches on what it needs:

• People records: employee profiles, org chart, effective dated job and pay changes, and an audit trail of changes and of who opened sensitive details
• Holiday and absence: requests, approvals with clash warnings, a team calendar, bank holidays for each UK nation and a calendar feed
• Sickness: self reporting, fit notes, return to work chats, Bradford Factor scores and Statutory Sick Pay
• Family leave: maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental, neonatal care and bereavement leave, with key dates and statutory pay worked out
• Expenses, mileage and overtime: claims with receipts, approvals and a payroll export
• Cases: grievance and disciplinary stages that follow the ACAS Code, flexible working requests and anonymous reporting
• Onboarding and leavers: checklists, a welcome portal for new starters, right to work checks and leaver holiday pay
• Performance: objectives, one to ones, review cycles, 360 feedback and probation decisions
• Training: a course catalogue, certificates, requests and a mandatory training matrix with expiry alerts
• Documents: policies with acknowledgement tracking, personal documents and letters generated from templates
• Compliance: subject access requests, the accident book, retention schedules and sexual harassment prevention evidence
• Engagement: announcements, shout outs, celebrations and anonymous pulse surveys
• Recruitment: vacancies, a candidate pipeline, interview scorecards and offers that turn into onboarding
• Reports: headcount, turnover, absence, holiday liability, gender pay gap and training compliance, with small groups hidden so nobody can be identified
• Ask HR: an assistant that answers questions from each person's own records and passes anything else to your HR team

Built for UK employment rules

Most HR software is designed for many countries at once. This portal is designed around how UK employment actually works:

• holiday entitlement of at least 5.6 weeks, pro rata for part time staff and accrued at 12.07% for irregular hours workers
• separate bank holidays for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
• Statutory Sick Pay worked out under the rules in force on the day, including the changes from April 2026
• statutory family leave and pay with qualifying weeks, notice deadlines and keeping in touch days
• flexible working as a day one right, with the statutory business reasons for refusal
• grievance and disciplinary stages, letters and the right to be accompanied, in line with the ACAS Code of Practice
• right to work checks with follow up dates before permission runs out
• subject access requests tracked against the one month deadline
• gender pay gap figures with pay quartiles

Figures are shown as a guide. Your payroll provider and your advisers keep the final say, and the portal says so wherever money is involved.

Off-the-shelf HR software or a bespoke HR portal?

Off-the-shelf HR software is a sensible choice for a small team with standard processes, and a bespoke HR portal makes more sense when your organisation does not fit the template.

A tailored portal tends to pay off when:

• you have more than one employer, site or set of terms and conditions
• your approval chains, sick pay scheme or leave rules are not the standard ones
• per user pricing grows every time you hire
• HR data needs to flow into payroll, rotas, finance or a business system you already run
• you want the portal in your own brand, under your own control

Because we start from a working HR portal rather than a blank page, you get the fit of bespoke software without starting from nothing. Where data needs to move between systems, our data integrations work connects them.

How we tailor it to your organisation

Everything in the demo can be fine tuned for you. We start by walking through the demo with your HR team and noting what you would change, then shape the portal around your answers:

• your leave year, entitlements, carry over rules and approval chains
• your sick pay scheme, absence triggers and return to work process
• your policies, letter templates, onboarding checklists and review cycles
• your roles and permissions, down to who can see pay or health information
• your branding, and single sign on with the work accounts your staff already use
• exports and connections to your payroll, rota and finance software

In the demo, Ask HR answers a set list of questions from the sample records. In your portal it can be connected to an AI agent that reads your own policies and handbook, with anything it cannot answer passed to a person.

Security is built in from the start: two factor sign in, bank details, National Insurance numbers and sickness details encrypted, changes and access to sensitive details logged, and each person limited to what their role allows.