Client: Hercules Plc
Sector: Construction — labour supply and site services
What we did: The complete workforce platform — built when Hercules was two people, still growing now they're a listed Plc.
Here's our favourite kind of story. When we built Hercules their first system, they were a two-person business. Today they're a Plc listed on the London Stock Exchange, supplying skilled labour to major UK infrastructure projects — and the system we built has grown with them every step of the way, for well over a decade.
Supplying construction labour at that scale is a compliance and logistics machine: thousands of workers, dozens of client sites, right-to-work rules, qualification expiry dates, and payroll that absolutely must be right on Friday.
What we built
Personnel and compliance. Every worker's record with the documentation the industry demands — contracts, right-to-work, inductions, health declarations, modern-slavery acknowledgements — plus qualifications with expiry tracking (medicals, drug and alcohol tests, licences), so nobody arrives on site with a lapsed card. A built-in training module manages courses, providers and attendees, feeding qualifications automatically when courses complete.
Placements and rates. Workers are placed onto client sites against site-specific rate cards by role, with CIS handling and a multi-company group structure baked in — each placement routed to the right Hercules company with the right payroll references, whether the worker is PAYE, CIS or supplied through an agency. And when a whole crew moves to a new site, a purpose-built site-move tool re-places them in one action instead of one at a time.
Contracts, generated and kept. Employment contracts are produced from the placement itself, and the signed copies live on the worker's record — so "can you show me their contract?" is always a ten-second question.
Holiday and absence. Holiday, sickness and bank-holiday tracking across every contract type — with workers requesting holiday through a web form that lands straight in the system. When Hercules moved payroll platforms, we redesigned holiday handling around the new model and rebuilt the export that used to take ten minutes; it now runs in about ten seconds.
Payroll integration. Placements flow to the InTime payroll platform over its SOAP API, and cost journals (basic pay, employer NI, pension) export to the accounts — no re-keying at either end. And when the InTime/InPay combination took over time capture entirely, we retired the FileMaker timesheet module cleanly, keeping years of history for reference. That's the other thing bespoke means: the system sheds functions as gracefully as it gains them, instead of hauling dead weight forever.
Right people, right screens. Role-based access privileges throughout — managers see their sites and their workers, admin sees the lot, and sensitive personnel notes stay confidential.
The outcome
One system carrying thousands of employment records, run by a business that grew from two people to a listed Plc without ever outgrowing its software. That's what bespoke means: the system was never too big for the small company, and never too small for the big one.
Technologies used
Claris FileMaker and FileMaker Server, InTime payroll integration (SOAP API and direct SQL), contract generation, web holiday-request form, CIS and multi-company payroll structures, role-based access control, ExecuteSQL-optimised search and reporting.
Growing faster than your systems?
If your business is scaling and your software isn't keeping up — or you're drowning in compliance paperwork — we've grown a system from two people to a Plc. We'll keep up.
Get in touch or call us on 0330 113 0958.