A local AI admin worker for HR teams
HR holds some of the most sensitive data in any organisation, and spends a surprising share of its week on arithmetic and on answering the same policy questions.
Short answer
OpenClerq helps an HR team with the rule-based part of the job without sending employee data anywhere. Pro-rata salaries, holiday accrual and overtime run as formulas in a deterministic engine; a local model explains policies and drafts routine letters; recurring reminders run on a schedule; and every run is recorded. Decisions about people stay with people.
The rule-based side of HR
- Pro-rata pay for people who join or leave mid-month.
- Holiday accrual for part-year employees, rounded the way your policy says.
- Overtime at the right multiplier.
- The same questions about leave, expenses and notice, answered from the same handbook.
- Routine letters — confirmations, reminders, changes of hours — that follow a template.
What OpenClerq does for an HR team
| Task | How | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Pro-rata salary, holiday accrual, overtime | Formula specs with a proof record per run | Today |
| Explaining a policy in plain language | Paste the relevant section into the Ask panel; a local model explains it | Today |
| Drafting routine letters | Give the Ask panel your template and the details; the model drafts, a person reviews every letter | Today |
| Recurring reminders | Scheduled triggers for probation reviews, month-end payroll inputs, annual leave carry-over | Today |
| Answering from the whole handbook | Full-text search and policy-controlled retrieval over your own records (Memory 2.0) | 0.6 |
| Reading payroll input exports directly | The tool-calling loop, limited to an allowed folder | 0.6 |
| Your country's employment and payroll rules | A module built and maintained for your jurisdiction | Module |
Example formulas, checked by the engine
| Rule | Formula | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Pro-rata salary | round(monthly_salary * days_worked / days_in_month * 100) / 100 | 4,200 a month, 17 of 30 days → 2,380.00 |
| Holiday accrual, to the nearest half day | round(annual_days * months_worked / 12 * 2) / 2 | 25 days a year, 7 months → 14.5 days |
| Overtime | overtime_hours * hourly_rate * multiplier | 6 hours at 22.50, time and a half → 202.50 |
Whether pro-rata pay counts calendar days or working days, and how accrual rounds, differ between countries and contracts. Each is written into the formula, where anyone can read and check it, rather than left to a model's judgement.
What stays with people
- Every decision about an individual: hiring, pay, performance, discipline, dismissal.
- Anything that requires employment-law judgement. OpenClerq's default instructions treat legal advice as out of scope.
- Sending letters and submitting payroll.
Employee data stays on your machine
Employee records are personal data, and health or absence details are often special-category data. With a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, nothing about an employee leaves the computer, so no AI provider becomes a processor of it. OpenClerq's files are readable only by the user running it, its secrets are encrypted with a key held in the operating system's keychain, and the gateway only answers requests from that machine, with a token. See how to use AI with confidential data.
Frequently asked questions
Can OpenClerq run payroll?
No. It calculates individual adjustments — pro-rata pay, accrual, overtime — exactly and explains them. Payroll runs, statutory deductions and submissions stay in your payroll system and with your team.
Can it answer employees' policy questions?
It can explain a policy section you give it, for HR to review. Answering across a whole handbook arrives with retrieval over your own records in release 0.6. It is a tool for the HR team, not a self-service bot for employees.
Is using AI with employee data allowed under GDPR?
It can be, with a lawful basis, minimal data and the right agreements with any processor. Running the model locally removes the AI provider from the picture; your other obligations remain. This is not legal advice.
Does it know our country's employment law?
No. The open-source core carries no jurisdiction-specific rules. You write the formulas and templates, or we build a module for your country through Clerq for Business.