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

Personio has acquired Circula, a leading European spend management platform, to consolidate payroll, expenses, and benefits under a single system. Over 3,000 mid-market European businesses currently rely on Circula for their expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable, and tax-optimized benefits. Circula's expertise in solving the complexities of European spend management, where rules change at every border, makes this acquisition significant.

CEO of Personio, Hanno Renner, stated that with the acquisition, all aspects of a company's spending on employees—payroll, expenses, and benefits—will be integrated under one roof. This is the first of its kind in Europe and a major step towards Personio being the system European businesses use for their entire workforce.

Personio and Circula have already collaborated closely for years, serving many of Personio's 16,000 European customers. The acquisition makes this partnership permanent, enabling a deeper integration of data and business workflows. Their products complement each other perfectly at the intersection of payroll and spend. Expenses flow into payroll through both payroll integrations and Personio's native payroll engine. Both companies have extensive knowledge of compliance and tax in their respective domains.

Circula and Personio share a commitment to making tax advisors' lives easier. Both have built communities of hundreds of tax advisors and developed features facilitating collaboration between tax advisors and their clients. They will continue developing deep DATEV integrations to transfer data into DATEV's payroll and accounting systems.

Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO and co-founder of Circula, explained that by joining forces with Personio, Circula will solve syncing employee data between spend management and HR platforms, which has been a challenge so far. DATEV, DATEV integration, and the existing integration will remain unchanged. What will change is that HR, spend, and now payroll will be designed as one integrated system. Circula will continue to operate as Circula by Personio.