For the HR leader who is also the MI team

Reports that tell you where you are heading, not only where you have been.

Absence, attrition, employee relations, recruitment and learning: cleaned, joined together and read against your own history, so a pocket, a single point of failure or a rising trend shows up while there is still time to change direction. HR intelligence your board can trust, without sending your data anywhere.

Try it on a file See what it reads Talk to Peter
  • Runs entirely in your browser
  • No account or IT project
  • Synthetic demo data only

Where you are heading

A monthly report is a rear-view mirror. This reads the road ahead.

Reporting that only describes last month tells you what has already happened. The model keeps your history, joins the areas that normally sit apart, and shows which groups are drifting away from the rest and where a measure is heading, so you can act while it still matters. It also tells you how far to trust each reading.

  1. Is a pocket forming?

    Every department and division is compared with the organisation. A group is called a pocket when its twelve-month figure is at least 1.25 times the organisation’s, and the rule and the numbers behind it are shown on the screen. Weekday patterns are read as well.

    In our test data: one department starts 61.6% of its sickness episodes on a Monday or Friday; the other seven sit between 26.7% and 29.5%. A single organisation-wide figure would look ordinary.

    Published research finds one-day sickness starts on Mondays and Fridays at about 1.4 to 1.9 times the rate of other weekdays, though they are a small share of all days lost: a prompt to look, not a verdict. Occup Environ Med, 2001

  2. What if a key person is off?

    It finds managers with no credible deputy within one grade step, and where that sits alongside a team under strain: an establishment gap, an unusual absence pattern, leave not being taken, a manager already rated red. The question it puts to you is where one absence would stop work.

    This is a structural check on cover, not a forecast. Teams under three people are never judged, and the engine says plainly when it has no evidence either way.

  3. What do the areas say together?

    Ten reads that each join two or more areas, such as attrition with absence, employee relations and engagement; regretted leavers by manager with what their exit interviews say; pay position against performance and the function’s attrition trend. Each shows the areas it joins and a count.

    Absence and turnover are linked in the research, moderately: a corrected correlation of about .25 across the literature, and smaller in recent studies. So a joined-up signal is a reason to investigate, never a conclusion. J Organ Behav, 2012

  4. How far should you trust it?

    The leaver-risk model is checked against people who have already left, on your own history: how many it flagged, how many of those left within six months, and how that compares with chance. A navigation system is only useful if it says how often it has been right on your roads.

    On our synthetic test data it scored 1.0, which means no better than chance, and the screen said exactly that. Synthetic data says nothing about your organisation; on yours it will report whatever is true.

All figures above are from synthetic test data or from linked, published research. Timeliness is the other half: your month’s exports are read in seconds in your browser, so the picture is there the day the files land.

From export to board pack

Messy exports in. The reports a team would build, out.

Most HR functions hold years of HRIS data they cannot use, because turning it into something reliable takes a team and weeks. This is that work, done once, the same way every month, with every step visible.

  1. Step 1

    Bring what you already have

    Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Oracle, MHR iTrent, Zellis ResourceLink, BambooHR, a payroll file, a spreadsheet someone built years ago. Different column names, different date formats, the same facts underneath. Drop them in; nothing is uploaded.

    • Workday
    • SuccessFactors
    • Oracle HCM
    • iTrent
    • ResourceLink
    • BambooHR
    • Payroll
    • Excel and Access (EUC)

  2. Step 2

    It cleans, audits and puts them on one model

    Columns are mapped to one set of fields. What it cannot place on its own comes to a short list, biggest effect first, one click each, and your decision is remembered for next month. Conflicts between files are reported, not hidden, and every figure keeps its trail back to the source file.

    The Mapping Desk: seven things need a decision, each with the column it concerns, a drop-down to choose the field, and a note saying whether it blocks the upload.
    The Mapping Desk on synthetic Meridian Bank files: what it could not place, ranked.

  3. Step 3

    Out come the Power BI reports

    The same model produces a Power BI project: one page per area, headline figures, tables and charts, ready to open and refresh. For slicing by division, department and month it also writes a star-schema model with a library of measures, so Power BI recalculates from the engine’s own figures and never disagrees with them.

    • Tick the screens you want, or describe the report in a sentence
    • Opened and checked in the real Power BI Desktop
    • No team of report builders, no parallel spreadsheet
    A Power BI report page, Headlines Report 31 May 2026: 3,013 active employees, headcount by division, absence, attrition, learning, recruitment, diversity, employee relations, organisation design and management risk panels, each with a one-line summary.
    A page rendered in Power BI from the generated project, synthetic Meridian Bank data. Power BI displays the figures; the engine calculates them.

Tested against deliberately hostile files: nine exports carrying 24 habits of real HRIS and spreadsheet extracts (report titles above the header, totals inside the data, several date formats, differently padded ids, European number formats, a pivot-shaped file). 19 were handled correctly first time, 5 were flagged for a person to decide, and none was silently read wrong. The audit of all nine took 3.8 seconds on a laptop, including opening the browser.

Synthetic demo data throughout. To see this on your own exports, talk to us.

Guided tour

See the answers. Five steps, nothing to install.

These are the real screens from the running product, on a synthetic bank called Meridian Bank. Pick a step, or use the arrow keys. The tour shows the product; it does not contain it — to see it on your own data, talk to us.

The Headlines Report for Meridian Bank: 3,013 heads and 2,864.7 FTE, absence in red against target, attrition and training with their status, and a one-sentence summary.

Step 1 of 5

Start with the answer

What does the board need to know this month?

  1. Heads and FTE, side by side 3,013 people are 2,864.7 full-time equivalents: part-time working is counted, not rounded away, and last year sits underneath.
  2. Red, amber or green against your own target The rate is judged against the target you set, not a number baked into the product, and it says so.
  3. One sentence for the board The screen writes its own summary: what needs attention, what is on target, what is for information.
Want this on your own data?

Demo data — Meridian Bank, a synthetic organisation. The numbers on every step come from one run of the product.

How it works

Any system. Any mix. One model.

The same person is a Worker in one system, an Assignment in another and a row in somebody's spreadsheet. HR Intelligence maps every source onto one vocabulary, so the headcount in the board pack and the leavers in the tracker finally describe the same people.

You do not have to run one of these. Workday, Oracle Fusion HCM, SAP SuccessFactors, Core HR (People XD), BambooHR, iTrent, ResourceLink, ADP and Sage HR are the systems whose column names the engine already knows, and an Excel or CSV export covers everything else. Load one of them, or all of them, or a different vendor in every country — the engine merges whatever it is given into the same model, and a system it has never seen is read from its headers rather than turned away.

Each part of the HR lifecycle lives in a different system Six lifecycle stages left to right. Attract (recruitment) sits in an applicant tracking system. Join (onboarding) sits in a hand-made checklist spreadsheet. Develop (learning) sits in a learning system. Work and Leave both sit in the core HRIS, which holds headcount, absence, performance, pay and leavers; a client may run a different core HRIS in each country. Resolve (employee relations) sits in a hand-made case tracker spreadsheet. Surveys sit in a forms tool or spreadsheet outside all of these. Everything flows into one box, HR Intelligence in your browser, and out as one linked view. Attractrecruitment Joinonboarding Developlearning Workcore HR Resolveemployee relations Leaveleavers, exit Recruiting system (ATS) for example Greenhouse or Workday Recruiting Onboarding checklist a spreadsheet HAND-MADE (EUC) Learning system (LMS) for example Cornerstone or SuccessFactors Learning Core HRIS for example Workday Headcount Absence Pay Performance one per country, often Case tracker a spreadsheet HAND-MADE (EUC) Core HRIS the same system as Work Leavers Surveys: a forms tool or a spreadsheet, outside every system above Different lifecycles, different systems, and often a different HRIS per country HR Intelligence, in your browser Audit, map, collate, link. Nothing uploaded. One linked view Every lifecycle, joined on one person
Each part of the HR lifecycle lives in a different system Six lifecycle stages top to bottom. Attract (recruitment) sits in an applicant tracking system. Join (onboarding) sits in a hand-made checklist spreadsheet. Develop (learning) sits in a learning system. Work holds headcount, absence, performance and pay in the core HRIS, which a client may run once per country. Resolve (employee relations) sits in a hand-made case tracker spreadsheet. Leave (leavers) sits in the same core HRIS. Surveys sit in a forms tool or spreadsheet. Everything flows into one box, HR Intelligence in your browser, and out as one linked view. Attractrecruitment Recruiting system (ATS)Greenhouse, Workday Recruiting Joinonboarding Checklist spreadsheetHAND-MADE (EUC) Developlearning Learning system (LMS)Cornerstone, SF Learning Workcore HR Core HRIS, e.g. Workday headcount, absence,performance, pay often one per country ResolveER cases Case tracker sheetHAND-MADE (EUC) Leaveleavers Core HRISthe same system as Work Surveys a forms tool or a spreadsheet Different lifecycles, different systems, often a different HRIS per country HR Intelligence, in your browser Audit, map, collate, link One linked view Every lifecycle, joined
Each lifecycle keeps its facts in its own system. Headcount, absence, performance, pay and leavers share one core HRIS; recruitment, learning, employee relations and surveys do not. HR Intelligence reads them all in your browser and links them.

Field map

Selected system: Workday

Unified model Workday field
Employee ReferenceWorker_ID
DepartmentSupervisory_Organization
Job TitleJob_Profile_Name
GradeGrade
Full Time EquivalentFTE
Legal GenderGender
EthnicityEthnicity
Date of BirthDate_of_Birth
Start DateHire_Date
Manager ReferenceManager_ID
Cost CentreCost_Center_ID
LocationLocation
Leave DateTermination_Date

Workday names all 13 of these columns in its own vocabulary.

Names are read from the engine's own field registry — 180 canonical fields, a vocabulary for each of ten systems, and 1,176 spellings the mapper resolves across the headcount, absence and leavers exports. These thirteen are the engine's headcount template, kept to the columns whose own name resolves to the field they belong to. A muted name is the engine's template column rather than the system's word: that vocabulary has no name for the column, so the engine reads your header, or you map it once on upload — which is why a system listed above with a short vocabulary, or one not listed at all, still gets the same model. Load one source or every source; they merge. Headcount is not a column anywhere — the engine counts rows — and leave reason and absence days arrive with the leavers and absence workbooks.

Check the privacy claim — do not take it on trust

Watch it read a file. Here, in this tab.

Before HR Intelligence calculates anything, it reads the header row and profiles every column. That step is running on this page, on an export held in memory — so you can see the work without handing a file to a website. Your own data stays on your own machine, which is the whole claim.

What runs here

  1. Read the header row and detect the delimiter
  2. Profile every column: shape, fill rate, distinct values
  3. Match each header to a field in the unified model

The sample is a fictional Meridian Bank headcount export, held as a string in js/site.js. No upload, no storage, no request — the Network panel stays empty.

The profile appears here: every column, its shape, and the field it maps to.

Services

Six ways to work with the person who built it.

Help Studios is led by Peter Roberts, almost twenty years in HR data and MI inside regulated financial services: HRIS migrations, data transformation, FTE and governance models, HR and Finance reporting that has to agree, and recruitment, diversity and absence reporting for boards and regulators. Each of these can be bought on its own, with or without the software.

  1. The Joined-Up Review

    For a board or HR director who has good reports and no connections between them.

    Absence, attrition, employee relations, recruitment, learning and survey results read together, by team and by manager. It shows what no single report can: where low absence is really under-reporting, where a team that people keep trying to leave also has the odd warning pattern, where a good-looking number hides a pocket.

    You get: a board paper in plain words, the evidence behind every finding, and a short list of what to look at first. Typically: two to three weeks.

  2. HR Data Health Check

    For anyone about to rely on HR data they have never audited.

    Your exports read, mapped to one model and audited: duplicates, ids that do not join, definitions that differ between files, months that are missing, and every figure traced back to the file it came from.

    You get: an issues list ranked by effect, agreed definitions and a clean model. Typically: one to two weeks, fixed scope.

  3. HRIS migration data assurance

    For a programme moving HR data between systems.

    Scoping before you sign, mapping and cleansing, mock-load reconciliation, cutover checks, and the reporting rebuilt afterwards. In my experience the failure points of an HR migration are very often the data, not the system.

    You get: a data workstream lead who has done this before, with the software to take weeks out of the cleansing and reconciliation. Engagement: contract or fixed workstream.

  4. One version of the truth: HR and Finance

    For two divisions that use the same people data in different ways.

    Headcount, FTE, establishment and payroll agreed between HR and Finance, with every difference explained and an FTE governance model both sides will accept, so the board sees one number.

    You get: an agreed definition set, a reconciliation that foots, and a monthly routine. Typically: project, then a light retainer.

  5. Reporting, regulation and Power BI

    For teams that owe the board, the regulator or the Finance Charter a number.

    Recruitment and diversity MI, absence deep dives, employee relations reporting, Women in Finance Charter and other regulatory returns, built as Power BI projects your own team can own, with the trail back to the source.

    You get: reports you can defend and a model you can extend. Engagement: project or interim cover.

  6. Corporate change and transactions

    For an organisation being sold, bought or merged.

    HR data prepared for due diligence and data rooms, two organisations’ definitions reconciled into one set of reporting, and day-one reporting that holds up. Experience of UK financial-services transactions.

    You get: a controlled, documented data position under time pressure. Engagement: contract.

Ongoing: a monthly MI service on your data with a short written read-out, or interim people-analytics cover while you recruit. Conversation first, fixed scope where possible, no prices on this site.

Talk about a project

About

Built for regulated environments. Designed for scrutiny.

Help Studios is led by Peter Roberts — twenty years in regulated financial services HR, from operational people management to board-facing MI. HR Intelligence was built because board packs deserve calculation integrity, not demo numbers.

Twenty years in regulated FS

Product judgement shaped by FCA-regulated employers, not generic SaaS patterns.

Calculation integrity

No hardcoded numbers in any calculation, render, or fallback path; honest insufficient-data states when files are absent.

Signals, never decisions

Every analytical panel says the same thing: the engine surfaces signals; HR investigates.

Peter Roberts, founder, Help Studios Ltd. Almost twenty years in HR data and MI in UK regulated financial services: HRIS migrations, data transformation, FTE and governance models, HR and Finance reporting that has to agree, and recruitment, diversity and absence reporting for boards and regulators.

Next step

Ready to see it on your data?

After the demo, book a confidential walkthrough. We can work from anonymised extracts — you choose what to share.

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Company
Help Studios Ltd, Wirral, UK
Engagement
Conversation first — no pricing on this site