HR software for care homes

Is HollyHR a good fit for your care home?

The recruitment file CQC actually audits

Regulation 19 (fit and proper persons employed) is not a broad aspiration — it comes with Schedule 3, an itemised list of what must be confirmed and kept for everyone employed for the regulated activity, agency staff and volunteers included: proof of identity with a recent photograph, the DBS certificate where the role requires one, satisfactory evidence of conduct in previous care employment, verification of why the person left previous care roles, documentary evidence of qualifications, a full employment history with a written explanation of any gaps (relaxed for most volunteers), and health information relevant to the tasks intrinsic to the role. Regulation 18 adds the staffing side: training, supervision and appraisal, with completion monitored and acted on.

Under CQC's assessment framework, the 'safe and effective staffing' quality statement is where this lands in practice: recruitment files, training records, supervision logs and rotas are exactly what gets sampled. HollyHR keeps the file side of that evidence against each person — the documents you collected at recruitment, including the employment history and gap explanations, dated records of in-employment changes, and qualification documents — and runs expiry-dated compliance requirements with per-person acknowledgement states alongside, so 'show me this person's file' is a lookup, not a reconstruction.

DBS records without the renewal panic

Providing personal care to adults is regulated activity, so care roles need an enhanced DBS check with a barred-list check — and then the awkward part starts: certificates have no official expiry date. The renewal cycle is your policy to set (commonly every one to three years, or continuous assurance through the Update Service), and it falls to you to actually run it, across a workforce where roughly a quarter of people change every year.

HollyHR keeps each person's certificate record and evidence on file, with expiry-dated compliance requirements alongside, so the renewal policy you choose is written down where the whole management team can see it. Certificate-level renewal reminders are on the roadmap; we would rather say that plainly than imply them.

The boundary, stated clearly: HollyHR records checks, it does not run them. Applications, the Update Service and barred-list checks happen with the Disclosure and Barring Service and your registered body — and the legal duty to refer someone to the DBS after dismissal for harm or risk of harm sits with you, in your safeguarding process.

Sponsored workers and right to work, after the 2025 rule change

Overseas recruitment reshaped care workforces, then the rules moved: the Health and Care Worker route closed to new overseas applications for care workers and senior care workers in July 2025, with transitional arrangements running to July 2028 for people already in the UK. If you sponsor staff, the record-keeping duties did not shrink — passport and status copies, current contact details, absence records and job descriptions must be kept for the whole sponsorship and a year beyond it, and right-to-work checks carry civil penalties of up to £45,000 per worker for a first breach.

HollyHR gives that paperwork a home. The right-to-work flow is deliberately two-part — the new starter provides their evidence, and an authorised HR or System Admin records the employer's decision — so the check is a documented judgement, not a tick. Sponsor-file documents, follow-up-check dates and status records live on the person's file with everything else. HollyHR is not an immigration adviser and does not run the checks or talk to the Home Office for you; it keeps the evidence trail that proves you did.

Rotas change weekly. The people record shouldn't.

Care staffing runs on part-time contracts, zero-hours arrangements, nights and sleep-ins — a shape that breaks HR systems designed around one full-time pattern. Skills for Care puts around a fifth of the care workforce on zero-hours contracts — rising to a third in domiciliary care — and pay questions like sleep-in shifts have their own case law. Those are payroll and rota problems; what HR owes them is a record that keeps up.

In HollyHR, each person carries their own working pattern — part-time, job-share or a zero-hours template — with pro-rata leave following the pattern for regular hours, and irregular-hours entitlement held as a reviewed allowance rather than a silent guess. Sickness sits alongside leave so absence has one home, and the who's-away view shows the week without exposing anyone's reasons. Your rota tool schedules the shifts; HollyHR keeps the durable record those shifts hang off.

What a CQC inspector, a funder or a family can ask about your data

A care provider's HR system holds some of the most sensitive employment data there is — health information, DBS outcomes, bank details — and inspection culture means someone will eventually ask where it lives and who can see it. 'A spreadsheet on the office PC' is an answer that ages badly.

HollyHR gives you answers you can put in writing: durable HR records hosted in the UK/EU, role-based access so sensitive records stay limited to the roles that need them, an extra layer of application-level encryption on selected high-sensitivity values such as bank details, audit records for sensitive actions, and a published sub-processor register. Subject access requests are served by structured records and export instead of a week of digging through shared drives.

Where HollyHR stops, and says so

HollyHR does not schedule rotas, plan care, manage medication, run DBS or right-to-work checks, employ your workers or run payroll. Care software is a crowded room of specialist systems, and the honest position for an HR record is to sit underneath them and hand off cleanly rather than pretend to replace them.

So the hand-offs are deliberate: payroll-ready export for your bureau or payroll software, document and record export for inspections, and full organisation export if you ever want to leave. If your care organisation is a charity or non-profit, the charity discount applies to you too — £1 per person per month on Standard.

Check the source, not just our summary

Rules and product pages change. These are the first-party references behind this page. Facts last checked 24 July 2026.

Questions people ask

The people record underneath a well-run care service.

Free for up to 10 active people, £2 per person on Standard after that — £1 for charitable providers. We're onboarding early-access teams one at a time.