When a decision is challenged, being right is not enough. You have to prove it. Synthro keeps the proof, as the work happens.
BCEA · LRA · EEA · POPIA built in
The reality of South African labour law
A fair reason is not enough without a fair procedure, and both are proved with documents: dates, signatures, the record of the conversation. Without them, being right is only a recollection.
30 days
To refer an unfair dismissal to the CCMA
From the date of dismissal. What follows is decided on the file you can produce.
12 months
Of pay: the compensation cap
For an unfair dismissal under section 194 of the LRA, rising to 24 months where the dismissal is automatically unfair.
Dated.
Every decision, the day it happens
Warnings, reviews, leave approvals and hearing outcomes, recorded against the employee as the work is done.
Exportable.
As a CCMA evidence pack
The whole employee file in one download when a referral arrives, not assembled under a deadline.
Built for South African industries
Direct payroll integration
Outlook&
Google Calendar syncOn every plan · Synthro is a Microsoft-verified publisher
How it works
01One record
Contract, ID, banking, documents, leave, goals and warnings, opened the day they're hired and held on one file until the day they leave. No folder on someone's desktop. No spreadsheet only one person can read.
Thabo Mokoena
Operations Supervisor · started 04 Feb
02Performance
Goals, OKRs, 360° reviews, PIPs and 1-on-1s on the same record, updating as the work happens. Review season stops being a hunt for evidence and becomes a summary of a year you already have.
Goals · this quarter
Review cycle
03The admin
All 16 BCEA leave types auto-calculated. GPS clock-in clears the routine days on its own. Payroll pulls from the same record, so nobody retypes a number twice. Managers review the exceptions, not the queue.
Annual leave · 3 days
Thabo Mokoena · 14 to 16 April
Clocked in · Cape Town HQ
08:03 · within 300m · auto approved
04Nala
BCEA, LRA and EEA answered in seconds. Warning letters and PIPs drafted in minutes. Burnout risk surfaced while there is still time to act on it. Nala reasons over the actual record, not a generic legal FAQ.
Two people are showing burnout indicators from leave, overtime and review data.
Sarah · High risk
14 sick days this cycle, review scores falling
John · Medium risk
No leave in 8 months, 18 days accrued
05It holds up
Every warning, review and approval timestamped the moment it happens, not reconstructed the night before a hearing. Full CCMA evidence export in one click. Last chapter on purpose: this is what Synthro handles so you can stop thinking about it.
Audit trail · timestamped as it happened
Recorded by T. Nkosi
Recorded by T. Nkosi
Recorded by HR
Recorded by T. Nkosi
The employee lifecycle
Most HR files are pieced together after the fact, from inboxes and a spreadsheet. Synthro writes the record as it happens, from the day you hire someone to the day they leave.
Onboarding
Lerato Dlamini · starts Monday
01 · Hiring
A BCEA-compliant contract the moment you add someone, and a day-one checklist for their ID, tax form and bank details, uploaded before payroll runs.
This week
Operations team
02 · Day to day
Leave approved against the live BCEA balance, hours from timesheets and check-in, and the result pushed to SimplePay and into Outlook or Google Calendar.
Exit file
Thabo Mokoena
03 · Letting go
Warnings, PIPs and hearings on one file in date order, then final pay, the certificate of service and the offboarding checklist, all from the record you already kept.
Documentation is your only defence.
Timesheets and attendance
Staff clock in from their phone. Synthro checks the coordinates against your geofence and approves the ordinary ones instantly, so the only thing that reaches a manager is the one that needs a person to look at it.
Clock-in demo
Thabo Mokoena · Monday, 23 Feb 2026
Clocking in from Cape Town HQ, 1 Adderley Street
85-90%
Auto-approved
Managers only see the 10 to 15% that genuinely needs a decision.
<200ms
GPS processed
Coordinates checked against the geofence, then discarded. Never written to a database column.
Zero
Employee setup
The browser asks for location once and remembers. There is no app to install.
Meet Nala
Not a legal FAQ with your company name on it. Nala answers BCEA, LRA and EEA questions having already read the file of the person you are asking about, so the answer is about your employee rather than about the Act in general.
NALA
HR advisor · reads your Synthro records
Goals, analytics and HR queries - your team, your policies, or SA labour law.
Nala reads attendance patterns, leave frequency, goal completion and manager interaction data, and flags the people whose signals are moving the wrong way while a conversation can still change the outcome.
Payroll integration
Employees, approved timesheets and leave push straight into your existing SimplePay account over the API. Your payroll run does not change. It just stops starting with someone retyping a month of hours.
Live sync demo
Synthro → SimplePay API
Profile fields pushed to the SimplePay API
Put a number on it
Bring your headcount and your leave policy. In thirty minutes you will have a rand figure for the hours your managers are losing to approvals and chasing, and what is left once it runs itself.
From the founder
“I watched a company fight its own employees over a spreadsheet. So I built something better.”
At a company I worked at, I watched managers and employees argue over leave balances tracked in Excel. Lateness disputes. Sick leave nobody could confirm. Records that went missing exactly when they mattered. Not because anyone was dishonest, but because the paper trail was never there in the first place.
We built Synthro so a business has one place where all of that already exists. Compliance handled as a by-product of normal work, performance managed all year instead of in one panicked week, and enough of the admin gone that a small team can get back to the thing they are actually good at.
South African businesses are not losing money because they are bad at business. They are losing it because their HR tools were never built for South Africa.
Naphtali Tsikada
Founder, Synthro (Pty) Ltd
Before you ask
Yes, on every plan. Each person connects the Microsoft account their work email is on, and approved leave, shifts, check-in meetings, hearings and goal deadlines land in their Outlook calendar. Synthro is a Microsoft-verified publisher, and Google Calendar works the same way.
Nothing changes in your payroll. Synthro connects to your existing SimplePay account and syncs leave, timesheets and employee records automatically. Your payroll run continues exactly as it does today, minus the retyping.
Import your employees from a CSV and connect SimplePay. There is no data-migration service to buy and no implementation fee. Core employee and leave records are set up first, with the rest completed across your first working week.
A dedicated onboarding specialist does it with you. Core leave and employee records are configured first, with payroll sync and the compliance modules completed across your first working week. Hands-on, and included in the plan rather than quoted separately.
Your data is yours and it exports in full, in formats you can actually open, so nothing is held hostage. Licence terms are set out before you sign anything, and we go through them with you rather than leaving you to find them in a footer.
Synthro keeps the record as the work happens, so the answer can be yes. Book thirty minutes and see it run on your own setup.
