Before you move anything, it is worth being precise about what you are consolidating. Most European SMEs arrive at C2 from the same place: employee details in a spreadsheet, contracts in a shared drive, leave requests in email or chat, training records in whoever’s inbox ran the last session, and a recruitment process living in a mailbox. Nothing is broken, exactly. It is just that no two sources agree, and every change has to be made more than once.
That is the actual problem C2 solves, and it is worth naming it that way rather than as a list of features. One record per person, one place where it changes, and workflows that read from that record instead of asking someone to retype it.
What is in the platform on every plan
- Employee records and a self-service portal — the foundation. Profiles, contracts, roles and documents, with employees able to maintain their own details.
- Onboarding and offboarding workflows — structured flows that assign tasks and collect documents.
- Leave and absence management, and time and attendance.
- Learning portal and mandatory training — assign courses, track progress, and manage mandatory training across your team.
- Preliminary payroll — a prepared set of figures for whoever processes your payroll. The section below is about this one, because it is the most misread item on the list.
- Dashboards and reporting.
All six are on every plan, including Startup.
What arrives with the SME and Enterprise plans
Recruitment and applicant tracking with a jobs portal, performance management for reviews, goals and feedback, the AI HR assistant, and AI writing help for job descriptions and training content. Enterprise adds more AI capacity, custom integrations, multi-zone redundancy and personal onboarding. If you are starting on Startup, plan your first weeks around the core areas above and treat the rest as a later decision, not a missing piece.
Where the platform stops: payroll
This matters more than any feature list, because an unspoken assumption here will derail your rollout in week two.
C2 prepares a preliminary payroll. It is not a payroll processor. The difference is the whole of your payroll handoff: the platform holds the employee records, the leave and the attendance that a payroll run depends on, and it gets you as far as a prepared set of figures — but the run itself, the filings and the payments stay with your payroll provider or your accountant.
So settle three things before your first pay period, not during it: how the preliminary payroll reaches whoever processes it, on what cycle, and who is accountable for checking that it arrived and was right. This is where consolidation projects quietly fail. The records end up in one place, and then one process still depends on somebody remembering to move something, which is the problem you were trying to remove.
Say this out loud to your finance contact early. “Preliminary payroll” is a phrase people hear as either more or less than it means, and the two wrong readings cause different problems: one team assumes C2 now runs payroll and stops briefing the accountant, the other assumes C2 does nothing payroll-related and keeps rekeying figures it could have received.
Take stock before you start
Write down, for each of the areas that hold information — employee records, onboarding, leave, attendance and training — where that information lives today, who maintains it, and who can currently see it. An hour at most, and much less if you already know. That single page is where your migration conversation, your access rule and your retention schedule all come from, so it is worth doing properly rather than from memory.