About Synthro

HR that holds up when it is questioned.

Synthro is the HR system for growing South African businesses that keeps the record behind every decision: dated, findable, and ready when the CCMA or a labour inspector asks.

Why we exist

South African business runs on paperwork it never chose.

Leave is a spreadsheet nobody dares touch. Performance is a review that happens once a year, too late to matter. Compliance is a box of paper you pray is complete the day the CCMA calls. None of it is the work. It is the tax you pay to do the work.

We started Synthro because that tax falls hardest on the businesses that can least afford it. The systems built to fix it were made for London boardrooms and priced for New York, never quite right for a company in Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town trying to grow without drowning in admin.

So we built the opposite: one system that keeps the record as the work happens, so every HR decision can be shown, dated and defended, and managers get their time back to actually manage people.

An HR manager working through a printed employee file on a South African stoep in late afternoon light
3 years

records of time worked and pay

What BCEA section 31 requires, from the last entry

30 days

to refer an unfair dismissal

The clock your paperwork races when a decision is challenged

4 Sep 2025

the new Dismissal Code took effect

Replacing Schedule 8, the rules most discipline files were written against

Our vision

Every South African employer should be able to prove what they did, not just remember it.

The mission

Make HR decisions defensible for businesses that cannot carry a full HR department's paperwork: one record per employee, a documented process managers can follow, and evidence ready when someone asks for it. Affordable, local, and built for South African labour law.

Where it gets tested

  1. 01

    Day one

    Written particulars

    Contract template
  2. 02

    Every month

    Time worked and pay

    Daily rate calculator
  3. 03

    All year

    The leave trail

    Leave tracker
  4. 04

    When it goes wrong

    The discipline chain

    Hearing notice template
  5. 05

    The last day

    The exit documents

    Certificate of service
A man standing still in the middle of a marked intersection, unhurried, traffic lines running past him on every side

It reads like a problem for a company bigger than yours. Then someone resigns on the Friday, calls it constructive dismissal on the Monday, and you go looking for a file that three managers have been keeping in their own way.

What we stand for

01

Compliance first

Every feature starts from what the BCEA, POPIA and the 2025 Dismissal Code will ask you to show.

02

Ruthlessly simple

If a manager needs a manual, we failed. Simplicity is non-negotiable.

03

Local by default

Rand pricing, South African labour law, ZA phone formats - always.

04

AI that earns trust

Our AI assistant cites the act and section it relied on, so you can check it before you act.

Why Synthro

The People

Meet the team.

Founder & CEO

Naphtali Tsikada

Naphtali
Tsikada

At a company I worked at, I saw HR fall apart because everything ran on spreadsheets. Leave disputes, missing records, compliance gaps. I had the technical background to fix it, so I built Synthro. Every feature exists because a real South African business needed it.

Chief Operating Officer

Malachi Tsikada

Malachi
Tsikada

As COO, I focus on execution quality, customer outcomes, and scalable operating systems that help South African teams run better HR with fewer bottlenecks and stronger compliance discipline.

Find out where your record would fail.

Take the 4-minute HR Defensibility Score and see the gaps in your own records, or book 30 minutes and we will walk through them with you. From R49.99 per user.

Book a demo

Not ready to talk? Take something useful anyway: the leave payout calculator, retrenchment calculator and free BCEA templates are yours, no sign-up.