UK Mid-Market HR Teams Are Ditching Spreadsheets for BreatheHR and HiBob — Here Is What Goes Wrong When They Rush It

If your HR team is still running on spreadsheets and shared drives, you already know that needs to change. But the fix is not buying a platform and expecting it to sort itself out. BreatheHR works well for UK firms with under 200 staff who want something simple and HMRC-friendly. HiBob is the stronger pick for mid-market companies between 100 and 500 employees who care about culture tools and employee experience alongside the compliance basics. Personio covers a similar range but leans harder into workflow automation and European payroll. All three will do the job — provided you do not skip the boring parts of the migration. The firms getting this wrong are the ones treating a platform purchase as a finish line rather than a starting pistol.

The Spreadsheet Problem Is Real, but It Is Not What You Think

Every HR director at a 150-person UK firm knows the spreadsheet situation is bad. The sickness tracker lives in one file. The holiday log lives in another. The org chart is a PowerPoint slide that was last updated when someone left in March. Onboarding checklists are Word documents emailed between three people. None of it connects to payroll.

The problem is not that spreadsheets exist. It is that they have become load-bearing infrastructure. Somebody built a formula in 2019 that calculates pro-rata holiday entitlement, and nobody else knows how it works. The absence data lives in Sarah's personal OneDrive because the shared folder hit its storage limit. The annual leave approval process is an email chain that occasionally gets lost.

When the breaking point arrives — usually a payroll error, a tribunal scare, or a new HR director with standards — the reaction is predictable. Buy a platform. Move everything across. Go live in six weeks. This is where the trouble starts.

What BreatheHR, HiBob, and Personio Actually Cost in Pounds

BreatheHR prices by employee band and everything is in GBP. For up to 10 employees it costs £22 per month. That scales through the bands: 11 to 50 employees runs around £72 to £180 per month, 51 to 100 is roughly £250 to £350, and 101 to 200 lands between £400 and £525 per month. BreatheHR caps at 200 employees. If you are bigger than that, you have outgrown it. The pricing includes core HR, leave management, sickness tracking, document storage, and basic reporting. Payroll is not included — BreatheHR connects to external payroll providers rather than running its own.

HiBob does not publish fixed prices. The market rate sits between $8 and $25 per employee per month depending on modules and contract terms, which at current exchange rates puts a 200-person company somewhere between £1,300 and £4,000 per month. HiBob's sweet spot is 100 to 500 employees. It includes core HR, time off, compensation management, performance reviews, 360 feedback, engagement surveys, and native UK payroll. The culture and engagement tools are what set it apart from the other two — if your firm cares about employee experience beyond the compliance checkbox, HiBob built its product around that.

Personio starts at roughly $5 per employee per month for the Essentials tier, with Professional and Enterprise tiers above that. For a 200-person firm, expect to pay somewhere between £800 and £2,500 per month depending on modules. Personio covers 10 to 5,000 employees, making it the broadest range of the three. Its strengths are workflow automation, European payroll support, and a recruiting module that the other two lack at the same depth. Personio bills annually and offers a 10 per cent discount for upfront payment.

The Five Migration Failures That Keep Repeating

I have watched this pattern play out at enough mid-market firms now to recite it from memory. The specifics change. The structure does not.

Failure one: migrating dirty data. The spreadsheets are full of inconsistencies. Job titles that do not match between files. Start dates that are wrong because someone typed them in manually. Former employees who were never removed. Duplicate records where someone changed their name after marriage and got entered twice. Firms pour this data straight into the new platform and then wonder why the reports look wrong. Data cleaning should take 20 to 30 per cent of your total migration timeline. If you have allocated zero time for it, you have already failed.

Failure two: no change management. The HR team picks a platform, configures it over a weekend, and sends an all-staff email on Monday saying "we have moved to HiBob, here is your login." Staff ignore it. Managers keep emailing holiday requests because that is what they have always done. Within a month the new platform and the old spreadsheets are running in parallel, which is worse than either approach on its own. The firms that get this right run the new system alongside the old one for a defined period, train managers in small groups, and have visible executive backing.

Failure three: ignoring the reporting gap. The old spreadsheets, for all their faults, produced the reports that the board expects. Headcount by department. Absence rates by quarter. Cost per hire. The new platform can produce better reports — eventually. But nobody configured the custom reports before go-live, so the first board meeting after migration features an HR director apologising for having no data. Build the reports first. Populate them with test data. Show the board what they will get before you switch.

Failure four: underestimating the payroll connection. Every mid-market UK firm runs payroll through a provider — Sage, IRIS, ADP, or an outsourced bureau. The new HR platform needs to talk to that provider. BreatheHR does this through file exports and partner connections. HiBob has native UK payroll. Personio has its own payroll module. But the connection is never as clean as the sales demo suggests. Mapping fields between systems, handling tax codes, getting the pension auto-enrolment data flowing correctly — this is detailed, fiddly work that takes weeks, not days. The firms that get burned are the ones who assumed the vendor would handle it.

Failure five: buying too much platform. A 120-person services firm does not need 360 feedback, OKR tracking, compensation benchmarking, and AI-powered workforce planning. It needs accurate absence records, a holiday calendar that works, a place to store contracts, and a clean feed to payroll. Starting with the full module set creates configuration overhead, confuses users, and delays go-live. Buy the core. Get people using it. Add modules when there is a genuine business need, not because the sales team offered a bundle discount.

What the Successful Migrations Actually Look Like

The firms that get this right share a few characteristics. None of them are glamorous.

They start with a data audit. Before they look at a single vendor, someone sits down with the spreadsheets and documents exactly what data exists, where it lives, who owns it, and what state it is in. This takes two to four weeks for a 200-person firm. It is tedious work and nobody wants to do it. It is also the single biggest predictor of migration success.

They pick a project owner who is not the highest-ranking person. The HR director sponsors the project. The person who actually runs it day-to-day is someone operational — typically an HR coordinator or people operations manager who understands both the current processes and the new platform. This person needs dedicated time, not a migration bolted onto their existing workload.

They set a realistic timeline. For a mid-market firm moving from spreadsheets to a proper HRIS, allow three to six months from vendor selection to full go-live. That covers data cleaning, platform configuration, testing, parallel running, training, and the inevitable problems that surface in the first month. Firms that try to do it in six weeks either cut corners they cannot afford to cut or push the go-live date anyway.

They keep the first phase boring. Core HR records. Leave management. Sickness tracking. Document storage. Payroll connection. That is it. No performance reviews, no engagement surveys, no pulse checks. Get the basics running cleanly for three months, then decide what to add.

The Vendor Problem Nobody Talks About

BreatheHR, HiBob, and Personio all have capable sales teams and decent onboarding support. What none of them do well enough is tell prospective customers that they are not ready. A firm with 3,000 employee records scattered across 47 spreadsheets, no consistent job title taxonomy, and a payroll provider running on software from 2014 is not going to have a smooth migration regardless of which platform they choose.

The vendor's incentive is to close the deal and start the subscription. Onboarding support varies — HiBob provides dedicated setup specialists, BreatheHR offers guided configuration, Personio has a deployment team — but none of them are going to clean your data for you. That is your job. If your internal team does not have the capacity, budget £5,000 to £15,000 for an external HR systems consultant to run the data migration. It is the best money you will spend on the entire project.

GDPR, Right to Access, and the Compliance Clock

There is a legal dimension to this migration that HR teams consistently underestimate. Under UK GDPR, employees have the right to request access to all personal data you hold on them. When that data lives in spreadsheets across four different people's laptops, responding within the statutory 30-day window becomes a scramble. A proper HRIS puts everything in one searchable place, which makes subject access requests straightforward rather than panicked.

All three platforms are GDPR-compliant. BreatheHR is UK-hosted, ISO 27001 certified, and built around UK data protection requirements from the ground up. HiBob holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications and stores UK customer data in compliance with UK GDPR. Personio, with its European roots, was built for GDPR from its inception and holds ISO 27001 certification.

Beyond data protection, UK employers have record-keeping obligations under the Working Time Regulations 1998, the Employment Rights Act 1996, and auto-enrolment pension legislation. Spreadsheet-based records are not inherently non-compliant, but they are difficult to audit and easy to corrupt. If HMRC queries your holiday entitlement calculations or the Pensions Regulator asks for your auto-enrolment records, a clean HRIS export is a better answer than a folder of spreadsheets with conflicting version numbers.

The compliance argument is often what finally gets the finance director to approve the budget. Use it. But do not let it become the justification for rushing the migration — a badly configured HRIS with dirty data is no more compliant than the spreadsheets it replaced.

Which Platform for Which Firm

BreatheHR fits UK firms with 20 to 200 employees who want a straightforward, GBP-priced system that handles the compliance basics without requiring a project manager to configure it. It is the least expensive option and the quickest to get running. The ceiling is 200 employees — beyond that, you will outgrow it. Companies already using no-code automation to connect their UK business tools will find BreatheHR connects well through those same platforms.

HiBob fits UK firms with 100 to 500 employees that care about employee experience, culture, and engagement alongside the compliance and payroll fundamentals. It costs more than BreatheHR but includes tools that would require separate purchases on other platforms. The native UK payroll removes one of the biggest migration headaches.

Personio fits UK firms with 50 to 500 employees that want strong workflow automation and recruiting built into the same platform as core HR. Its European roots make it a good choice for firms with staff across the UK and EU. The pricing sits between BreatheHR and HiBob for comparable team sizes.

All three are better than your spreadsheets. None of them will fix a migration you rush.