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HRMQ

HRMQ is open-source HR and payroll administration on Nextcloud, built on the OpenRegister data layer. It runs inside your own Nextcloud — no external SaaS, no vendor lock-in, your employee data never leaves your instance.

Three things define what HRMQ now is:

  • A country-pluggable payroll engine — the gross-to-net chain is declarative configuration (a jurisdiction pack) run by a pure interpreter, not hardcoded PHP per country. The Netherlands ships as the first bundled pack.
  • Multi-administratie for accountants — one instance can run payroll for many client companies, with a per-user active-administratie switch.
  • A machine-checkable compliance corpus that grows with every capability — not narrative documentation, but a versioned rule set an executable engine audits your actual data against.

Who it's for​

HRMQ targets Dutch and EU small and medium-sized employers — and the accountant offices that run payroll on their behalf — who need HR and payroll administration without the enterprise price tag of an AFAS or the per-seat SaaS billing of a Personio or BambooHR. If you already run Nextcloud, HRMQ adds:

  • Timesheets, expense claims (with receipt-OCR prefill and mileage-rate compliance), leave & absence (verzuim) case management, automatic leave accrual, buy/sell of bovenwettelijk hours, and shift rostering with a working-time-law pre-check
  • Onboarding and offboarding wizards, recruiting (ATS) with offer e-signature and interview scheduling, compensation review cycles, goals & OKRs, performance reviews, an organisation chart, and an asset register
  • A country-pluggable payroll engine — retroactive corrections, sick pay, company-car bijtelling, DGA payroll mode, wage garnishment, werkkostenregeling, and run-to-run mutation reporting all on top of it
  • Multi-administratie, so one instance serves many client companies
  • A versioned, machine-checkable corpus of Dutch labour-law, EU-directive, wage-tax, and AVG/GDPR compliance rules — including a statutory-retention guard on data-subject erasure requests

The OpenRegister foundation​

Every HR object in HRMQ — Employee, EmploymentContract, Timesheet, Expense, LeaveRequest, PayrollRun, Payslip, and dozens more — is stored as an OpenRegister object. OpenRegister is the shared data layer every Conduction app is built on: it gives HRMQ schema validation, declarative lifecycle state machines (x-openregister-lifecycle), audit trails, and multi-tenant scoping for free, instead of hand-rolled PHP transition code and bespoke database tables.

Because HRMQ is a leaf app on top of OpenRegister, HRMQ itself must be installed alongside OpenRegister — see Installation for the dependency and first-run register import.

A versioned compliance rule corpus​

Alongside the OpenRegister data layer, HRMQ ships a static, versioned corpus of international HR/labour and payroll rules — EU labour directives, ILO conventions, GDPR for employee data, occupational health & safety, Dutch labour law, and payroll / wage-tax & social-security compliance — under lib/Standards/rules/. An executable RuleEngine audits the register's HR/labour objects against that corpus and reports compliance coverage. See The compliance rule engine for how it works and how to run it.

Honesty as a feature: the payroll disclaimer​

HRMQ's payroll calculation engine is not a certified payroll product, for any jurisdiction pack it runs. The bundled NL pack implements the Belastingdienst Rekenvoorschriften voor de geautomatiseerde loonadministratie 2026 formula chain over a verified, versioned tax-year parameter file, but the official Belastingdienst test sets have not yet been run against it. Every computed run carries an engineVersion (naming the exact pack and version that produced it) so its provenance is always traceable. Read the full disclaimer, the jurisdiction-pack trust model, and the engine's honestly-stated limits in The payroll engine before relying on its output — production use requires verification by a qualified loonadministrateur.

License​

HRMQ is free and open source under the EUPL-1.2 license — the European Union Public Licence. Source code lives at codeberg.org/Conduction/hrmq.

For support, contact support@conduction.nl.