Care Centre vs Employment Hero

Care Centre brings HR onboarding and compliance, rota planning, time and attendance, leave, payroll information, communication and recognition, surveys and maintenance together on a single staff record and staff app.

Employment Hero provides a broad HR and payroll core, with rotas, timesheets and clocking, chat and employment-law advice as separately priced add-ons.

For an organisation whose main requirement is HR administration and payroll, this may provide everything required; Care Centre takes a broader approach.

This is where the platforms are closest.

Care Centre provides standard onboarding covering DBS checks, right-to-work documentation, references and training certificates, configurable by the organisation and completed by new employees on their own phone. A compliance matrix shows every employee against every step, per home, and documents carry expiry dates and reminders.

Employment Hero provides an onboarding wizard with checklists and custom fields, a version-controlled policies library with acknowledgement tracking, a certifications record with expiry reminders, and incident reporting; its healthcare page states that work licences or certifications can be added to an employee profile with notification when they are expiring.

Named care onboarding steps and a per-home compliance matrix are not described in its published documentation.

Group-wide standards must hold while individual homes work to their own staffing requirements.

In Care Centre, settings are established at company level and configured for individual homes, covering staffing budgets, leave limits, pay rates, clock-in settings, shift rules, onboarding and compliance. Employees working across several homes use one staff record and login, and managers move between homes in one system.

Employment Hero manages rotas across multiple work sites from one platform, with location-based filtering and site-assigned managers; company-level rules with per-site overrides are not described.

Care home rotas must account for roles, skills, contracted hours, availability, leave and budgets, not only headcount.

Care Centre plans rotas around care roles such as nurses, senior carers and carers, tracking contracted hours against individual staff and taking account of holidays, days off, availability and preferences. Bank and agency workers sit on the same rota, and Working Time requirements are built into rota rules, including individual opt-outs.

Employment Hero's rota is an add-on at £2 per employee per month, building from templates, letting staff accept, decline, swap or bid for open shifts, and flagging Working Time Regulations before publishing. Planning by care role is not described.

The platforms differ in what a rota budget measures.

Care Centre builds staffing budgets into the rota as hours per role, per day, per home. Homes can restrict the rota to that budget, so a shift taking a role beyond its hours is prevented, not flagged, and dropped hours return as an open shift staff can claim from their phone.

Employment Hero costs the rota as it is built, letting organisations “See the exact wage cost of each rota and compare against the budget before publishing”, so budgeting rests on wage cost rather than care-role hours.

For homes monitoring overall staffing cost this is flexible; Care Centre is built around care-role hours.

Both platforms record attendance and prepare hours for pay.

Care Centre allows staff to clock in at a shared tablet within the home or from their own phone within a defined location. Whether an employee can clock in without a rostered shift is a setting for each home, and managers are alerted to no-shows and missed clock-outs. Additional time is approved before becoming overtime, and payroll data exports as CSV or XLSX, including a Moneysoft-ready format, within CareRota.

Employment Hero clocks staff from the Work app or the Hero Time Clock kiosk, with photograph capture, geofencing and a NoahFace facial-recognition integration. It runs payroll within the product, filing a Full Payment Submission to HMRC in real time on every pay run, producing payslips, handling statutory pay and managing pension auto-enrolment through PensionSync.

Stated plainly, Employment Hero runs payroll while Care Centre prepares and exports it, without producing payslips. A clock-in rule tied to a rostered shift, no-show alerts and approval of additional time are not described.

Both systems let employees request leave and managers control availability.

Employees see their remaining entitlement in days or hours and request leave from their phone; once approved, it updates the rota, the timesheet and payroll information. Homes can limit how many people in particular roles are away at once, and leave years, accrual and new-starter limits are set for the group and tuned per home.

Employment Hero provides all leave types with automated accruals and approvals, the UK statutory categories, holiday pay on the 52-week average, and leave on the team calendar. A limit by role for each site is not described.

Care Centre includes internal communication and recognition within the same staff app. Teams recognise colleagues against organisational values, while homes publish news, events, polls and priority messages. One-to-one and group chat provides a workplace alternative to personal messaging services such as WhatsApp.

Posts can include photographs, uploaded video and YouTube or Vimeo links, so a home can share an event, a celebration or news from the home with the whole team. Recognition can be given as a thank-you, a star, congratulations, a work-anniversary message or employee of the month, and chat messages can include photographs.

Employment Hero provides a company feed, Shout Outs, Recognitions tied to company values, milestones and Hero Points redeemable for gift cards; Chat is an add-on at £1 per employee per month.

The distinction is one of packaging: internal chat is included in the Care Centre platform and priced separately by Employment Hero.

Care Centre includes anonymous staff surveys alongside anonymous resident and family surveys, distributed by QR poster and email invitation. Results can be analysed using AI and developed into action plans, including a You said · We said · We did format, with a short pulse question at clock-out between surveys.

Employment Hero provides happiness pulse surveys, custom survey templates and anonymous custom surveys for employees. Resident and family surveys, a QR poster for people without a work email, an AI survey report and an action plan in that format are not described.

Care Centre extends beyond people management into the operation of the home, covering maintenance requests, scheduled checks, certificates with expiry dates, and a view aligned to Regulations 12 and 15.

Employment Hero does not provide maintenance management; its asset register records equipment issued to staff.

Care Centre uses AI selectively within administrative and communication tasks rather than operational decisions. According to Care Centre, personal information is redacted before relevant import processing and customer data is not used to train the underlying AI model. AI is deliberately not used to decide rotas, clocking, payroll or leave, where configured rules remain in control.

Employment Hero applies AI at the recruitment and payroll ends of employment, with an agent that scores, screens and interviews applicants and payroll that flags anomalies.

The pricing structures differ. Care Centre is priced per registered bed rather than per employee:

• CareRota: £6 per bed per month
• CareHR: £6 per bed per month
• People Management Platform: £10 per bed per month
• Setup: £0
• Contract: monthly rolling with 30 days' notice

The full platform combines CareRota and CareHR with CareChat and CareMaintenance. Staffing numbers do not affect the price: a 60-bed home with 80 employees is charged for 60 beds, not 80 users.

Employment Hero publishes per-employee, per-month prices, with a minimum of 10 users and billing on the higher of contracted or active users. HR Essentials is £4 (minimum £40 a month), HR Engage £7 (minimum £70), and Elite and Unlimited are quoted on request, with rotas and time and attendance, payroll, chat and advisory priced on top, each with its own minimum — £10 per employee per month at list prices for the first four.

For smaller organisations this may give a lower entry price; Care Centre's per-bed model reflects the employee-to-bed ratios found in residential care.

Both platforms are cloud-based and relatively quick to implement.

Care Centre requires no proprietary hardware: staff use their own phones and homes can use standard Android tablets. Configuration, staff-data import and live training are provided without a setup fee, with support from a UK-based team focused on the care sector. The platform is in use in homes including Esmere Gardens, Banbury Heights and Shipston Lodge.

Employment Hero is demo-led, with a help centre, in-platform chat and unlimited phone support on higher plans; its pricing page sets out minimum user numbers and a minimum monthly amount per module.