Build defensible probation files for UK micro-employers
From 1 January 2027 you have six months to part with an unsuitable hire, and the compensation cap is gone. A focused £19/mo tracker beats a £200/mo HR suite.
Executive Summary
In a nutshell
A narrow SaaS tool that spins up a six-month probation plan the moment a new hire starts: dated milestone meetings, agendas, written-warning templates, and an ACAS-aligned dismissal pack. Aimed at UK micro-employers (1 to 9 staff) who do not have an HR function and will, from 1 January 2027, have just six months to part with an unsuitable hire instead of two years. The compensation cap on unfair dismissal claims is being abolished at the same time, so the downside of a sloppy probation has gone from "capped at ~£115k" to "whatever a tribunal decides". The product is a wedge, not a suite: cheaper than BrightHR or Breathe, narrower than CharlieHR, focused entirely on producing a defensible paper trail inside the new qualifying window.
The Story
Meet the user
Dan owns a small artisan bakery in Bath with five staff. He hired a new counter assistant six weeks ago who has been late three times, snapped at a regular, and seems uninterested in learning the till. Dan knows he probably should have addressed it in week two but he was elbow-deep in sourdough and hoping it would settle. He vaguely remembers that under the new rules he has six months to sort it before the new hire gets full unfair dismissal rights, and he has heard there are no caps any more on what a tribunal can award. He does not have a contract template, has never written a performance warning, and has no idea whether he is supposed to be having weekly one-to-ones or quarterly reviews.
He spends a Sunday afternoon Googling ACAS templates, gets lost in a Croner article on disciplinary procedure, abandons the idea of paying his solicitor £400 for an hour, and almost signs up for BrightHR before realising the salesperson wants a 12-month contract for a feature list he will never use. Then he finds ProbationPath. He pays £19. It asks him three questions about the role, builds him a 24-week timeline with five dated review meetings, generates a probation contract clause, drafts the agenda for next Tuesday's first concern conversation, and queues up the templates for written warning, extension letter, and dismissal pack at the right points. By Tuesday lunchtime he has a signed file note. By month four he either has a contributor or he has a defensible exit.
Scores
How does this idea stack up?
7.3/10
5.7 million UK private-sector businesses, ~1.2 million are employers, and the 1 to 9 staff micro segment is the underserved slice; existing HR suites treat probation as one tab in a 30-feature product.
Pain is real but acute only at the moment of dismissal. The compensation cap removal turns a £6,746 median award into uncapped exposure, which raises the stakes for every owner who has ever fudged a probation.
Standard CRUD plus scheduled emails plus PDF generation. No special APIs, no regulated data, no integrations required. A solo dev ships v1 in 2 to 3 weeks.
Royal Assent landed December 2025, the qualifying period halves on 1 January 2027. We are inside the 13-month awareness window where law firms and HR consultancies are loudly stoking demand.
The acute "January 2027" panic is event-driven and will fade once the regime is bedded in. Underlying need for defensible probation files is permanent, but the wedge must evolve into a fuller offering to stay relevant past 2028.
Solo-buildable, sub-£500 cost, content-led launch through accountants and payroll providers. No paid acquisition needed for early traction.
Strongest
Feasibility
This is a CRUD product with templates and a scheduler, not a platform.
Watch out
Durability
If the wedge does not expand into adjacent workflows (onboarding, performance reviews, simple HR records) within 18 months, BrightHR or CharlieHR will ship a probation timeline feature and the moat evaporates.
Pain Point
The problem
“Your six-month probation review will become your last chance to dismiss for poor performance without facing a potential unfair dismissal claim. Probationary periods should now be shorter than six months and used effectively.”
— HR-Inform on ERA 2025
Before the Employment Rights Act 2025, a UK employer had two years to assess whether a new hire was working out. Get the call wrong inside that window and the worst-case outcome was a discrimination claim, which is rare. From 1 January 2027 the qualifying period drops to six months, and the statutory cap on unfair dismissal compensation is abolished entirely. The median compensatory award in 2023-24 was £6,746 across 646 cases, but with the cap gone tribunals will assess actual financial loss, which for a senior hire on £60k could run into six figures.
For a micro-employer with no HR function this is procedurally terrifying. Best-practice guidance has already converged on a "5-month review model" where the final probation meeting must conclude by month five so notice can be served before the six-month threshold lands. That is a tight, time-boxed process with multiple dated touchpoints, contractual notice requirements, and an ACAS Code of Practice that, if ignored, lets a tribunal uplift the eventual award by up to 25 per cent. Currently the alternatives are: pay a solicitor £300 to £500 to draft a probation pack, hope your accountant's payroll software has HR templates, run a free 5-seat CharlieHR with an interface built for VC-backed startups, or wing it with ACAS templates and a Google Calendar.
What is missing is the boring middle: a five-question setup wizard that produces a complete, dated, ACAS-aligned probation file for one hire at a time, sold at sub-£20 a month, that owners can run without learning HR jargon.
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