The challenge
Guaranteed Hours is our own compliance product for the Employment Rights Act 2025 guaranteed-hours duty. It tracks the hours people work and flags when an offer of guaranteed hours is due.
Guaranteed Hours is a product we built and run ourselves. It exists for one duty in the Employment Rights Act 2025: the requirement for employers to offer guaranteed hours to workers whose hours have in practice become regular. The duty is expected to come into force in 2027. The product had to take the hours people actually work, keep track of them over time, and tell an employer plainly when an offer of guaranteed hours is due.
A duty like this is easy to agree with and hard to keep on top of. The information an employer needs is already somewhere, in rotas, timesheets and payroll, but nobody is looking at it with this question in mind. By the time someone notices a pattern, the offer may already be late. Most HR tools were not built around this duty, because until the Act it did not exist. We wanted a product that does one job well and gives employers time to prepare before the duty starts.
A new duty with a long lead time
New employment law usually arrives with a date and a rush. This one has a long run-up, with the guaranteed-hours duty expected in force in 2027. That gap is the opportunity. Employers who start tracking early will have the history they need on day one, rather than trying to rebuild it from old rotas.
We built Guaranteed Hours to be in place well before the duty starts, so the records exist by the time they matter. We explain the duty itself, and what employers need in place, in our article on the guaranteed-hours duty in the Employment Rights Act 2025.
Starting from the question employers will ask
We did not start with a feature list. We started with the question an operations manager or HR lead will ask on a Monday morning: do I owe anyone an offer of guaranteed hours, and if not yet, who is getting close?
Everything in the product answers that question or supports the answer. That kept the scope tight. It is built around one duty rather than trying to be a general HR platform, so it can do that one job properly.
This is how we approach every compliance and regulated tech project: find the decision the law asks someone to make, then build the shortest route to making it correctly.
Hours in, flags out
The core of the product is simple to describe. Hours worked go in. The product keeps track of them over time. When the pattern means an offer of guaranteed hours is due, it raises a flag.
A flag is only useful if it is clear. That was the test we held every screen to: a manager should understand what a flag means without reading the Act. That matters for a compliance tool, because a warning nobody understands is no better than no warning at all.
Written for people who are not lawyers
The people using a tool like this are managers and HR teams, not employment lawyers. So the product speaks plainly. It avoids legal shorthand where a normal sentence will do, and it explains what a flag means and what to do next.
The same goes for the website at guaranteedhours.co.uk, where we publish dated updates on the duty as it moves towards coming into force. A compliance product earns trust by being clear about what the law says, what is still expected rather than settled, and what the product does about it.
Where it goes from here
Guaranteed Hours is live, and the duty it serves is still ahead of us. As the detail of the duty is confirmed, the product will follow it. [RESULT: employers signed up ahead of the duty] [RESULT: workers tracked]
It is also a model for how we build SaaS products: one clear job, a small first version, and weekly releases after that. If your organisation has its own regulatory duty to track, see our work for HR and compliance, or get in touch to talk it through.