Donna HR runs the entire employee lifecycle — people records, payroll, documents, evaluations and headcount forecasting — in one structured system. Not another database to maintain. The place your people side actually lives.
In most growing companies, the people side is quietly scattered. Employee details sit in one spreadsheet, salaries in another, contracts in an email thread, evaluations in a folder someone forgot the name of, and the headcount plan in a slide from last quarter. Everything is technically written down somewhere — and yet no one can answer a simple question quickly. What did we spend on payroll last month? Who's up for review? What would three more engineers actually cost us?
Donna HR exists to end that. It is a single, structured system for the entire employee lifecycle: you add a person once, and their record becomes the source of truth for their documents, their payroll, their evaluations and their cost. Nothing has to be copied between tools, because there is only one place the information lives. When a salary changes, it changes everywhere. When payroll is locked, Finance already has the number. When a new hire is added, their portal is already waiting.
It is built for the people who actually run the company — founders, operators, HR leads and finance teams who don't have time to babysit software. There is no configuration marathon, no consultant required, no separate integrations to wire together. You get structure out of the box, and you get answers instead of another database to maintain. That is the whole idea behind Donna: bring order to how a business is run, so the team can spend its energy on the work rather than on holding the infrastructure together.
Most HR tools do one thing and leave the rest to spreadsheets. Donna HR covers the whole lifecycle — and because it sits inside Donna OS, the data never has to be re-entered anywhere else.
Add every employee with personal details, position, department, hire date and salary. Departments are derived automatically as you build the team, so the org structure stays right without extra bookkeeping.
Run payroll by period with country-specific tax presets, review totals line by line, then lock the finished period so nothing shifts after the fact. Every run is kept in a clean, auditable history.
Generate and store HR documents — contracts, letters, orders — straight from templates, each with automatic numbering. The right document for the right person is always one click away, never lost in an inbox.
Record performance reviews and ratings against each person over time. The history builds a real picture of how someone is developing — and feeds the signals that flag who needs attention before they leave.
Model headcount cost over time and run what-if scenarios by department — before you make the hire, not after the budget slips. See what a new team, a raise or a reorganization does to the numbers instantly.
Manage one or several company entities under the same account. Groups, holdings and multi-entity businesses keep every team separate and clean, while leadership still sees the whole picture in one view.
This is the actual shape of the product — the dashboard, the people table, a payroll run and a headcount forecast. It cycles on its own, or click a screen to jump straight to it.
| Employee | Department | Position | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| AK Aida Karimova | Engineering | Backend Lead | active |
| MB Marat Beisenov | Sales | Account Exec | active |
| EN Elena Novak | Design | Product Designer | review due |
| DT Dana Tulegenova | Finance | Accountant | active |
| RS Ruslan Shah | Engineering | Frontend Dev | onboarding |
Not features on a list — the recurring situations where the people side normally turns into a scramble of spreadsheets, chat messages and half-remembered details.
Add the person once — details, position, department, salary, start date. Their contract generates from a template with a tracked number, their record provisions a workspace seat in the Employee Portal automatically, and their cost lands in the next payroll period. One entry, everything downstream taken care of.
Pick the period, choose the tax preset, and review the totals line by line before anything is final. Lock the period when it's right, and the run posts straight to Finance as headcount cost — no re-keying figures into the ledger, no reconciliation the following week.
Open forecasting, add the scenario by department, and read the answer off the chart in seconds — fully loaded cost, quarter by quarter, taxes included. The what-if is a model, not a change: nothing touches live payroll until you actually make the hire.
Evaluations and tenure build a running picture of each person, and Donna surfaces who needs attention before a resignation lands on your desk. A review that's overdue, a rating that's slipped — flagged early, while there's still time to do something about it.
Every view follows the same calm, structured logic: the answer first, the detail underneath, and one accent color for what matters right now.
| AK Aida K. | active |
| EN Elena N. | review |
| RS Ruslan S. | new |
Donna HR fits companies somewhere between "too big for a spreadsheet" and "too lean for enterprise HR software." That's most growing businesses — a team of ten heading toward a hundred, maybe spread across a few entities or countries, where the founder or a single operations lead is still holding the people side together by hand.
For the founder or operator, it means never being surprised by a payroll number or a headcount cost again. For the HR or people lead, it means running the full lifecycle — hiring, documents, reviews, offboarding — without stitching three tools together. For the finance team, it means payroll that reconciles itself. And because Donna is one operating system rather than a pile of point tools, a company doesn't need an enormous IT budget to run on properly structured infrastructure — the same kind an established enterprise would spend years assembling.
Donna HR isn't an island. It's one module of Donna OS, and the moment a fact changes here, every other part of the company that depends on it is already up to date — no exports, no double entry, no reconciliation.
Payroll runs post directly to the ledger. Headcount cost is always reconciled with Finance, so the numbers leadership sees are the same numbers accounting is closing on — never a version behind.
Every employee record provisions a workspace seat — one identity across the whole OS. New hires land in their own portal automatically, with their profile, documents and payslips waiting, and only what's theirs to see.
Headcount, cost and attrition flow up into the company-wide overview, where people are read against workload, revenue and cash. The master view stays current without anyone preparing a report for it.
// start with HR alone, or add CRM, Legal, Finance and the Portal whenever you're ready — same data, same login, one bill.
HR data is the most sensitive data a company holds — salaries, contracts, personal details. Donna treats it that way from the database up, so protection is enforced by the platform itself rather than left to hope, habit or a checklist someone has to remember.
Every company's data is walled off at the database with row-level security. One tenant can never read another's records — isolation is enforced by the system, not by application code you have to trust.
Module admins manage settings, payroll locks and all records; members work only within the access they're granted. People see what they're meant to see — and nothing more.
Once a payroll period is closed it's locked, and the history is preserved. Finished runs can't be quietly altered after the fact, which keeps the record clean and audit-ready.
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest on managed, industry-standard cloud infrastructure, with authentication handled by a dedicated identity layer rather than home-grown code.
No. Donna HR works on its own from $500 a month. It's one module of Donna OS, so you can add CRM, Legal, Finance, the Employee Portal or the CEO overview later — but you only ever pay for what you turn on, on a single bill.
Yes. You can manage one or several company entities under the same account. Each entity keeps its own people, payroll and documents separate and clean, while leadership can still see the combined picture.
Payroll runs by period using country-specific tax presets. You pick the preset for the entity, review the calculated totals line by line, and lock the period when it's correct. Every run is kept in a full history.
If you also use Donna's Finance module, yes — a locked payroll run posts straight to the ledger as headcount cost, so there's no re-keying and no month-end reconciliation between HR and Finance.
Each employee record provisions a seat in the Employee Portal, where the person sees their own profile, documents and payslips — and only what's meant for them. Role-based access controls the rest.
Yes. You build the team by adding people, and departments are derived automatically as you go. If you're moving from spreadsheets or another system, reach out and we'll help you bring the data across cleanly.
Every company's data is isolated at the database with row-level security, access is role-based, payroll periods lock, and everything is encrypted in transit and at rest on managed cloud infrastructure. HR data is the most sensitive you hold, and Donna is built around that.
Create an account, set up your company, select the HR module and your billing, and you're in. There's no setup fee and you can cancel anytime. Get access from the button below and you'll be running your first payroll the same day.
Give your team one structured home — people, payroll, documents and forecasting — that talks to the rest of your business. Start with HR today.