BambooHR was built for salaried desks, and your Glasgow event crews don't sit at one

They're built for salaried, desk-based staff and have no real concept of shifts, venues, certifications, or variable pay. For a shift-based events or field workforce, the parts that matter most simply aren't there, so scheduling and pay end up in spreadsheets anyway.

Yes. A scheduling and certification layer over your existing HR tool runs £28k to £50k in 3 to 4 months, adding shift logic and compliance tracking while keeping the payroll and records you already use.

The system holds each person's tickets and certifications with expiry dates and alerts managers before they lapse, so you never roster an uncertified crew member onto a regulated job, which a spreadsheet routinely fails to catch.

A custom build encodes your real rules, overtime, shift premiums, unsociable hours, and feeds the result into payroll, replacing the manual reconciliation that causes errors every cycle.

You take on sensitive employee data, security, and statutory updates that a vendor would otherwise handle. For a shift-based workforce the fit is worth it; for a salaried team it's overkill, and a good developer will tell you which you are.

Usually not; companies that bring Digital Heroes their Workday quotes have been looking at six-figure implementations with 6 to 12 month rollouts before any customization starts. A custom HR platform scoped to what a 200-person company actually uses typically costs less than that implementation alone. Under 500 employees you would be paying for enterprise depth you will not touch for years.

Bring four things: your current tool list with annual costs, headcount now and projected in two years, the five workflows that waste the most HR hours each week, and any compliance requirements like multi-state employment or union rules. A sample data export from your current system helps too. Digital Heroes scoping calls with this prepared produce a fixed quote in days instead of weeks.

Choose boring and hireable: React or Next.js on the front end, Node.js or Django behind it, and PostgreSQL for data, since Postgres row-level security maps cleanly onto salary visibility rules. That is the Digital Heroes default for HR systems because any future team can maintain it. Be wary of agencies pushing an exotic stack; you will be hiring for it for a decade.

Divide the build cost by the monthly benefit, where benefit is hours saved times loaded hourly cost, plus subscription fees replaced, plus any revenue the software unlocks. Three staff saving 10 hours a week each at a $40 loaded rate is about $62,000 a year, which pays back a $60,000 build in roughly 12 months. Across Digital Heroes internal-tool projects, 12 to 24 months is the normal payback range, and anything projecting under 6 months usually means the spreadsheet is hiding costs.

Yes, and you should; the standard approach is to run both in parallel and cut over one module at a time, using BambooHR's API to keep employee data in sync. Your HR team keeps working normally while each new module is tested against real records. The final cutover then retires a system you have already replaced in daily use, not one you are gambling on.

No, most software projects run fully remote without any quality penalty, and what actually matters is 3 to 4 hours of working-hour overlap and a fixed weekly demo call. A team based in Glasgow earns its premium in specific cases: hardware installations, warehouse or clinic floor shadowing, and discovery workshops where watching your staff work beats any written brief. Choose for senior engineers and a track record first, and treat geography as a tiebreaker.

Plan for 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year, the average across Digital Heroes maintenance contracts, covering security patches, dependency updates, small feature changes, and monitoring. Hosting for a company under 1,000 employees usually adds $100 to $400 a month on AWS or similar. Unlike BambooHR or Workday, the cost does not grow every time you hire ten more people.

Remote works for almost all of it. The exceptions are hardware projects like biometric time clocks or badge readers, which need someone physically in Glasgow for installation and testing. Discovery workshops go faster in person, so some clients book one on-site week at the start and run everything else remote. Judge teams on their HR delivery record, not their zip code.

Nothing, if the handover was done right: you hold the repository, the cloud accounts, the deployment runbook, and the schema documentation, so any competent team can take over maintenance. This is why code ownership and infrastructure access belong in the contract rather than in goodwill. Ask for the handover package as a deliverable of the first release, not something promised for later.

The crossover usually shows up between 20 and 50 seats on premium tiers. Salesforce Enterprise lists at $165 per user per month, so 40 users cost about $79,000 a year in subscriptions, which is real money against a custom system you would own outright. Run the comparison over three years: if subscription spend beats the build cost plus 15-20% annual maintenance, custom wins on price before you even count workflow fit.

A skilled freelancer is the right call for a single-discipline scope under roughly $15,000, like a website, a plugin, or one integration. Above that, projects need design, backend, testing, and project management at once, and a solo builder becomes the single point of failure: if they get sick or take a bigger client, your project simply stops. Agencies bill 20-40% more per hour but carry continuity, code review, and someone to escalate to, which is what you are actually buying.

Digital Heroes builds custom HR software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Glasgow. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.