Personio acquires Circula to bring payroll, expenses, and benefits under one roof

Personio today announced it is joining forces with Circula, one of Europe’s leading spend management platforms. More than 3,000 European mid-market businesses already trust Circula with their expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable and tax-optimised benefits. ​

"Spend management is one of the capabilities our customers ask us for most, and it's complex to get right in Europe. Just as with payroll rules change at every border. Over the past 8 years Circula has already solved that complexity intuitively and powerfully,” says Hanno Renner, CEO and co-founder of Personio. ​

“With Circula joining Personio, everything a company spends on its people–payroll, expenses and benefits–comes together under one roof. That's a first in Europe, and a big step towards Personio being the system European businesses run their entire workforce on."

The two companies have already worked closely together for several years, serving many of Personio's 16,000 European customers together. The acquisition makes that partnership permanent and enables an even deeper integration of data and business workflows. Their products meet exactly where payroll and spend connect. Expenses flow into payroll through both payroll integrations and Personio’s native payroll engine, and each company has built deep compliance and tax expertise in its own domain, Personio in payroll and Circula in expenses and benefits.

Beyond their shared customer base and focus on small and mid-sized organisations, Circula and Personio are also united in their commitment to making tax advisors' lives easier.

Both companies have built a community of hundreds of tax advisors and developed features that facilitate collaboration between tax advisors and their clients. One part of that strategy has been deep DATEV integrations which transfer data into DATEV’s payroll and accounting systems. They will continue to develop and, over time, seamlessly integrate into a single solution.

"Circula has solved syncing employee data between spend management and HR platform, and hundreds of joint customers already use that integration. The unsolved part is that the tax logic on the expense side and on the payroll side has always been built by two different companies”, says Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO and co-founder of Circula.

“Joining forces with Personio today changes that. For our customers, DATEV stays, the existing integration stays, and expertise that Circula built stays. What changes is that HR, spend, and now payroll are designed to be one."

Circula will operate as Circula by Personio from today.

Lead image: Hanno Renner, CEO and co-founder of Personio and Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO and co-founder of Circula.