Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Serene HR is a human resources system for small and medium-sized businesses. It is operated by the company named below, referred to in this policy as "we" and "us".

Operated by

Serenity Digital Limited

Company number

08215186

Registered office

Ralls House, Parklands Business Park, Forest Road, Denmead, PO7 6XP

ICO registration

ZB782226

Contact

[email protected]

2. Two roles: your employer and us

Most of the personal data in the service is about the staff of the companies that use it. For that data:

• Your employer is the data controller. It decides what is recorded about you, who in the company may see it, and how long it is kept. Questions about your record, and most requests to exercise your rights, go to your employer in the first instance.
• We are the data processor. We hold and process the data on your employer's instructions, under the data processing terms in our Terms of Service, and we do not use it for any purpose of our own.

For a small amount of data we are the controller ourselves: the details needed to run your account and sign you in, records of how the service is used, and any correspondence you have with us at [email protected]. This policy covers both roles.

3. The personal data the service holds

The following categories are held for each employee, to the extent your employer has recorded them:

• Identity: name, preferred name, title, date of birth, gender, nationality, marital status, ethnicity, employee reference, photograph.
• Contact: work email and telephone, personal email and telephone, home address.
• Identifiers: National Insurance number, driving licence number.
• Employment: job title, department, location, start date, contract type, working hours and pattern, notice period, probation dates and outcome, line managers, status, and the timeline of changes to these.
• Pay and benefits: salary history, bonus payments, benefits, and the total reward statement built from them.
• Emergency contacts: the name, relationship and contact details of the people you have asked to be contacted in an emergency.
• Leave: entitlements, requests, approvals, and the reasons and notes attached to them.
• Sickness: absence records, including the reason recorded and any fit note details. See special category data.
• Time and attendance: rota shifts, clock-in and clock-out events, and the reports built from them.
• Documents: company documents assigned to you, your acknowledgement of them, and any expiry dates recorded against them.
• Performance: objectives, reviews, and notes written about you by your managers or HR.
• Account: your login email address, when you last signed in, and the notification preferences you have set.

Where your employer uses the customer relationship features of the service, the service also holds business contact details for people at other organisations. Your employer is the controller of that data too.

4. Sickness records and other special category data

Sickness records are information about your health, which UK data protection law treats as special category data. Ethnicity is special category data too. Your employer records them because employment law requires an employer to manage sickness absence and permits equal-opportunities monitoring; the condition relied on is the employment, social security and social protection condition in Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018, and your employer is responsible for the policy document that condition requires.

Who can see a sickness record is limited by role. The reason for an absence is visible to HR and to your own managers. Colleagues outside your management line see only that you are away, never why.

5. Where the data comes from

• Your employer, who creates and maintains your record.
• You, through the personal details you edit on your own profile, the leave and sickness you report, and the acknowledgements you make.
• A previous HR system, where your employer has imported its records into the service. Serene HR imports from Breathe HR.
• The clock-in kiosk, where your employer uses one. See the clock-in kiosk.

6. How the data is used, and on what basis

As processor, we use your employment data only to provide the service to your employer: to store it, display it to the people your employer has authorised, send the notifications your employer has configured, and produce the reports and statements the service offers. Your employer's lawful basis for the processing is its own; in most cases it is the performance of your employment contract and its legal obligations as an employer.

As controller, we use account and usage data:

• to sign you in and keep your session secure, which is necessary to provide the service you or your employer have asked for;
• to keep the service working, detect faults and investigate misuse, which is our legitimate interest in running a reliable and secure service;
• to answer support requests, which is our legitimate interest in supporting the people who use the service.

We do not sell personal data, use it for advertising, or make automated decisions about you that have a legal or similarly significant effect.

7. Signing in

The service has no passwords. To sign in you request a link, which is emailed to your work address through Brevo and is valid for a short time. Following it signs you in and, so that you are not asked again on the same device, sets a long-lived cookie on that browser. Signing out removes it. The time of each successful sign-in is recorded on your account.

Your employer controls whether you can sign in. Your account is closed when your employment ends.

8. The assistant

The service includes an assistant, called Ren, that answers questions about your own record and, for managers and HR, about the people they are responsible for. When you send it a message, the text of your message and the information the service looks up to answer it are sent to Anthropic, whose Claude model generates the reply. Under Anthropic's commercial terms that content is not used to train its models.

The assistant can only see what you can see. It cannot show you a colleague's record unless you are their manager or in HR, and it will not act on your behalf beyond the actions the service already lets you take. Your conversations are stored so that you can continue them, and your employer can turn the assistant off for any account.

9. The clock-in kiosk

Where your employer uses the rota kiosk, each clock-in, clock-out and break you record with your PIN is stored with the time, the location reported by the device, the device's IP address and its browser identifier. Your employer uses these to keep attendance records and to check that entries were made from the workplace. Your PIN is stored hashed and cannot be read back.

10. Where the data is kept

The application, its database and its file storage run on Laravel Cloud, in the EU West (London) region. Backups are held by the same provider.

11. Sub-processors

The following providers process personal data in the course of providing the service. We will give your employer notice before adding a provider that would process employee data.

12. International transfers

Some of the providers above are outside the United Kingdom. Where personal data leaves the UK, it does so under the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, as incorporated in each provider's data processing terms, together with the provider's own security commitments.

13. How the data is protected

• The most sensitive fields on employee, emergency contact, salary and bonus records are encrypted in the database, so that a copy of the database alone does not expose them.
• All connections to the service use TLS.
• Sign-in is by single-use emailed link; there are no passwords to steal or reuse.
• Every page is served with a content security policy that allows scripts only from the service itself.
• Photographs and documents are never served from a public address; the service checks who is asking before it sends a file.
• Each company's data is separated from every other company's at the database level, and that separation is tested automatically before any change is released.

14. The audit trail

The service keeps a record of who created, changed or deleted a record and when, including the values before and after a change. Your employer's HR staff can read this log. It exists so that changes to your record can be accounted for, and it is not used for monitoring your work.

15. How long the data is kept

• Your employment record is kept for as long as your employer keeps it. When you leave, your employer retains it as a leaver record; UK guidance is to keep employment records for six years after employment ends, and that is what the service is designed around. Your employer can archive and permanently delete a record.
• Deleted rota and time records are purged automatically after a period your employer sets, by default one year.
• Your account exists for as long as your employment record does and cannot be used to sign in once your employment has ended.
• Support correspondence is kept for as long as we need it to deal with the matter and to keep a record of what was agreed.
• A company's data is deleted, or returned in a portable form on request, when that company's use of the service ends, as set out in the Terms of Service.

16. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data held about you, to have inaccurate data corrected, to have data erased where there is no longer a reason to keep it, to restrict or object to certain processing, and to receive data you provided in a portable form.

For your employment record, make your request to your employer, who is the controller. We will assist your employer in responding. Much of your record you can read for yourself in the service, and the personal details section of it you can correct yourself from your profile.

For the account and support data we control, contact us at [email protected]. We aim to respond within one month.

17. Cookies and local storage

The service sets only the cookies it needs to work:

• a session cookie, which identifies your signed-in session and expires when it ends;
• a security token cookie, which protects forms against being submitted from another site;
• a long-lived sign-in cookie, set when you follow a sign-in link, so that you are not asked to sign in again on the same device.

The service also keeps a few display preferences in your browser's local storage, such as whether the sidebar is collapsed and which menus are open. These never leave your browser. There are no analytics or advertising cookies, and no third-party cookies of any kind.

18. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how your personal data has been handled, please raise it with your employer or with us first, and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

19. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy when the service changes in a way that affects how personal data is handled, and the date at the top will change with it. Where a change is significant we will tell your employer, who will tell you.