Cobalt never calculates pay.
That is a boundary, not a gap. Cobalt is the HR admin layer around payroll — not a payroll engine.
There is no gross-to-net calculation in Cobalt, no tax or National Insurance working, and no RTI submission to HMRC. What Cobalt does instead is get the figures ready properly. The payroll export on the Growth plan takes approved hours, approved leave and approved expense figures for a window and produces a sha256-verified download you can hand to your bureau, your accountant or your payroll software. Regenerate it and the new file supersedes the old one, so nobody has to work out which version actually went over.
The result comes back the same way. Payroll import on the Scale plan turns a provider CSV into a validated draft batch, and posting it writes one payroll journal into the ledger — with the person who imported the batch barred from being the person who posts it. If something is wrong, reverse it or cancel it; there is no quiet edit. You keep your payroll provider, and your accounts stop depending on somebody retyping a payslip summary.
The admin around your people, in one place.
Launch gives you a read-only employee directory. Growth is where HR becomes a working module. Scale adds the joiner, leaver and payroll machinery.
- A real employee record — identity, employment, position, sensitive and payroll fields, address and emergency contacts, with lifecycle states you can activate, put on leave, suspend, terminate with a required reason or move back to draft (Growth plan and above).
- Leave that cannot approve itself — requests, balances and a team month calendar, where a decision needs the manager or a leave-approval permission and can never be your own request (Growth).
- Timesheets by period — a day grid, on-behalf entry for staff who will not log in, and a bulk-approve queue for the week you have fallen behind (Growth).
- Documents that warn you — expiry tones turn amber within 30 days and red once expired, with a sensitive lock and a review step for anything staff upload themselves (Growth).
- Self-service you can bound — profile, own leave, own timesheets, own documents and an approvals queue, limited to an editable-fields whitelist you control (Growth).
- Expense claims that reach the ledger — expense and mileage lines, tiered mileage rates, per-category caps and out-of-policy blocking, approved through to a journal and reimbursement (Growth).
HR admin is mostly proof.
Most of the work is showing who approved what and when — and keeping the sensitive parts sensitive.
HR sits beside sales, purchasing and the ledger, so an approved claim becomes a journal instead of an email to whoever does the books.
Field-level permissions cover the sensitive and payroll parts of a record, and HR documents can carry a lock of their own.
Leave, timesheets, claims and document reviews all record who approved them, and separation of duties stops one person doing both halves.
An expense claim that ends in a bank file.
This is what having HR in the same system actually buys you.
Someone files a claim with expense and mileage lines. Tiered mileage rates and per-category caps apply as they type, and anything out of policy is blocked rather than argued about a month later. A manager approves it, and the claim posts a journal — real double entry, in the same ledger your accountant reads. On Scale, a reimbursement run picks up the approved claims, is approved by somebody other than the person who built it, and produces a bank payment file you can upload; if plans change, cancel the run. Nothing gets re-keyed between an HR tool and an accounting tool, because there is only one tool — the same idea that runs the rest of the business, as set out in how it works.
What each plan adds.
Said plainly, so you know before you buy.
Launch gives you a read-only employee directory — useful for knowing who works here, not for running HR. Growth is the working module: the employee record and its lifecycle, an org-chart view, leave with entitlement seeding and year rollover that both preview as a dry run before you commit (with a carry-over cap from policy and pro-rating for mid-year starters), timesheets, HR documents, self-service, expense claims and the payroll export. The HR dashboard shows pending approvals across leave, timesheets, expense claims and document reviews, plus upcoming document expiries, who is on leave today and headcount by department. HR settings cover the leave-year start month, balance enforcement (warn, block or off), the carry-over cap, the timesheet period and the self-service whitelist.
Scale adds the parts that matter once people join and leave often enough for a step to get missed: onboarding and offboarding checklist instances built from templates, a training matrix and course master with validity and expiry windows (it records completion and expiry — Cobalt does not host the training itself), an asset register with open-custody assignments and returns, payroll import, and reimbursement runs. The full line-by-line breakdown is on the pricing and comparison page.
Frequently asked questions.
What does Cobalt's HR module cover?
On Growth: employee records with lifecycle states, an org-chart view, leave with balances and a team calendar, timesheets by period, HR documents with expiry warnings, employee self-service and expense claims. Scale adds onboarding and offboarding checklists, a training matrix, an asset register, payroll import and reimbursement runs. Launch includes a read-only employee directory only.
Does Cobalt run payroll?
No. Cobalt does not calculate gross to net, work out tax or National Insurance, or submit RTI to HMRC. It produces a payroll export instead — approved hours, leave and expense figures for a window as a sha256-verified download — for whoever runs your payroll. On Scale it imports the result back as a single payroll journal, where the person who imported the batch cannot be the person who posts it. Cobalt is the HR admin layer around payroll, not a payroll engine.
Who can approve leave?
The employee's manager, or anyone holding the leave-approval permission. Nobody can approve their own request. Balances can warn, block or be ignored entirely, depending on how you set balance enforcement in HR settings.
Can employees see and update their own details?
Yes, on Growth. Self-service covers their profile, their own leave, timesheets and documents, and an approvals queue if they approve for others. You decide exactly which fields they can edit through a whitelist in HR settings, and anything they upload themselves goes through a review step before it counts.
Can I hide salary and other sensitive details from most staff?
Yes. The sensitive and payroll parts of an employee record have field-level permissions, so most people see the directory and the working details without the pay. HR documents can also be marked sensitive and locked separately.
Which plan do I need for HR?
Growth for anything you would call HR — employee records, leave, timesheets, documents, self-service, expense claims and the payroll export. Scale if you also want onboarding and offboarding checklists, training records, an asset register, payroll import or reimbursement runs. Launch only includes the read-only directory.
Related pages.
Put the people admin where the numbers are.
Records, leave, timesheets, documents and claims in one system — and a clean handover to whoever runs your payroll.
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