The HR problem is rarely the same twice. What changes between industries is not the law, it is which records carry dates and who the people with those records actually are.
Holiday for irregular-hours and part-year workers. For leave years beginning on or after 1 April 2024, holiday accrues at 12.07% of the hours actually worked in each pay period (source: GOV.UK — Holiday pay and entitlement reforms). Checked 2 September 2026.
Every other claim on this page is about how HR Henry is built, not about the law. The sector pages carry their own sources.
It is tempting to treat sector pages as marketing - the same product with a different photograph on top. That is not what these are, and it is worth explaining why before you pick one.
The employment law does not change. Holiday accrues the same way in a nursery as it does on a building site, right to work checks have the same retention period everywhere, and the Working Time Regulations do not care what you do for a living.
Three things do change, and they change a lot.
First, who holds the records. In hospitality and cleaning the records are about employees on variable hours. In construction and education a large share of your exposure sits with people who are not on your payroll at all and have no reason to keep you updated.
Second, what carries an expiry date. A nursery runs on renewals - paediatric first aid, safeguarding, food safety. A trades business runs on renewals too, but for vans and tickets and insurance rather than for people alone.
Third, what happens when something lapses. In some sectors an expired certificate is an administrative problem you fix next week. In others it means somebody cannot be sent to work that morning, and that is a different kind of urgency.
Each page below is written for one sector specifically, including the parts where HR Henry is not the right answer.
That is a fair position, and there is a reasonable chance the answer is one of these pages anyway.
The sectors above are not really six different products. They are six different combinations of the same handful of problems: hours that move, documents that expire, people who are not employees, and records you may have to produce at short notice.
If you employ people on fixed hours, everybody is in the same building, and nothing in your filing cabinet has a renewal date, the general features page is a better starting point than any of these - and a spreadsheet may genuinely still be the right answer for now.
If you recognise two or three of those problems but not the sector label, pick the page whose problems match rather than whose industry matches. A landscaping firm will find more of itself in the construction page than in a generic one, and a catering business will find more in hospitality.
No. It is the same product. What differs is which parts of it matter to you - a nursery leans on training expiry and staff files, a cleaning contractor leans on variable-hours holiday and multi-site clock-in, a trades business leans on vehicle dates and subcontractor insurance.
Almost certainly. The sectors above are six combinations of the same problems: hours that move, documents that expire, people who are not employees, and records you may have to produce quickly. Pick the page whose problems match rather than whose label matches.
Construction and trades, or education providers. Both are written around a workforce that is largely not on your payroll, and both cover the freelancer portal where subcontractors upload their own insurance, DBS and qualification documents.
Hospitality and cleaning both deal with this directly. Since April 2024, irregular-hours and part-year workers accrue holiday at 12.07% of the hours actually worked in each pay period, and both pages explain how that is calculated from approved timesheets.
No, and every sector page says so explicitly. No software makes a business compliant with CQC, Ofsted, CDM or anything else. What it does is hold your records in a form you can produce, with dates attached and a list of what is about to lapse.
Yes. There is a free trial, and the sensible test is to set up one real staff file properly - documents attached, training dated, right to work filed with the date of the check - and see whether the rest is worth moving.
