AI-first HRIS for the Philippines
Cayamanan is a complete HR system for Philippine businesses: hiring, employee records, contracts, payroll, leave and benefits. Ask Missy in plain English and it is done, with the same approvals your staff would need.
Free for any number of employees. No trial, no seat count, no per-payslip fee.
Missy
Listening
Added to her 201 file, with an expiry two years out.
She only ever does what you are allowed to do, and every change is on the record.
Looking it up
Finding the record you asked about, and only the ones you are allowed to see.
Meet Missy
Tell Missy what happened and she updates the records. New hire onboarded, training completed, address changed, contract ending. The things that eat an HR officer’s afternoon take a sentence.
She is not a chat window sitting beside your HR system. She is inside it, working on the same records your team does, held to the same rules.
Add Maria’s first aid training, completed 12 March, expires in two years.
I can add that to her records. Here is what I will write.
Employee
Maria S. Bautista
Course
First aid and basic life support
Completed
12 March 2026
Expires
12 March 2028
Missy has no shortcut into your data. She goes through the same door your staff does, and it is locked to her in exactly the same places.
Your payroll is calculated by software, not by AI. Missy explains the numbers. She never decides them.
One system
Hiring creates the record. The record carries the employment. The employment drives payroll. Nothing gets retyped along the way, because it is one system instead of four that email each other spreadsheets.
Post the role, track applicants, read resumes without opening every one, and turn an accepted offer into an employee record without retyping a thing.
The complete 201 file in one place, so nobody has to ask which folder, which spreadsheet, or which person left with the answer.
Contracts, rates, allowances and deductions, with a full history. Last year’s salary is still there next to this year’s, because you will be asked.
Cutoffs, government contributions, overtime, 13th month and final pay, calculated the same way every time and reproducible on demand.
Holidays, schedules, attendance and leave balances, so the payroll cutoff stops being a week of chasing people for corrections.
Benefits, performance reviews, and staff who can check their own leave balance instead of asking HR.
Employee records are ready today. The rest is being built in the order payroll needs it. We publish exactly what is finished and what is not, further down this page, so you can decide what to adopt and when.
The hardest part
Every item here has its own rules, every one of them changes when the law changes, and every one is wrong in a way somebody notices on payday. Get it right and nobody mentions it. Get it wrong and you spend a week apologising.
This is the part foreign software gets almost right, and almost right is what costs you a BIR penalty. Cayamanan starts from the Philippine rules instead of adapting to them.
Why we built it
A workforce is wealth. That is what the name says: Cayamanan, from kayamanan. Yet the systems that hold the record of a company’s people are usually a workbook nobody fully understands, or software written for another country and bent into shape.
So Cayamanan is built for the Philippine rules first, and given away. Not a trial, not a seat count, not a per-employee fee. A Filipino business can run its entire HR operation on it and pay nothing.
See it
Screens from the running application. Install it yourself in five minutes and these are the screens you get, on your own data.
Search, filter by department or status, and open anybody in a click. No more asking which spreadsheet has the current version.
Identity, contact, government IDs, family, background and onboarding, each in its own tab, each edited without leaving the record.
She can see the screen you are on, so you can ask about the person in front of you without repeating who they are.
What works today
Usable today for employee records. If you keep your 201 files in spreadsheets, you can move them in now, keep them there, and let Missy work on them. Here is the rest, so you can judge for yourself what to adopt and when.
Your data is walled off at the database, and important changes leave a trail.
Accounts, roles, and control over who is allowed to see and change what.
She can look things up and make changes, and asks first when it matters.
Departments, positions, locations and cost centers.
Personal details, government IDs, family, background, onboarding and documents.
Bring your existing workbook as it is. Missy works out which column is what.
Job requisitions, applicant pipeline, resume reading, interviews and offers.
Contracts with full history, rates, allowances and government enrolment.
Cutoffs, computation, payslips, 13th month, final pay and statutory reports.
Roadmap
We build in the order the work actually flows: the people first, then what they are employed under, then payroll. Skipping ahead would mean a payroll engine sitting on records that cannot tell you what somebody earned last March.
01
Organization structure, the full 201 file, employee documents, bulk import from CSV and Excel, and Missy able to operate on all of it.
02
Requisitions and approvals, a careers page, the applicant pipeline, resume parsing, interview scorecards and offers, ending in a one-click hand-off from accepted offer to 201 file with nothing retyped.
03
Effective-dated contracts, pay basis and rates, allowances, statutory enrolment, bank details and termination. Nothing is ever overwritten: a salary change closes one row and opens another.
04
The core. Holiday and schedule calendars, attendance import, versioned statutory tables, the deterministic engine, the run lifecycle from draft to finalized, payslips, 13th month and final pay.
05
Leave management, benefits administration, performance and employee self-service.
Why you can trust it
Cayamanan runs on your own server, so employee records, salaries and bank details stay with you. There is no vendor holding your data hostage at renewal time, because there is no renewal.
Self-hosted, with tenant separation enforced by the database itself.
A recruiter does not see salaries. A department head does not see another department. Nobody has to remember to hide anything, because the system will not hand it over in the first place.
Permissions checked on the server for every read and every change.
Payroll is done in exact centavos, with every rounding step deliberate and named. A finalized run still produces the identical figure years later, which is what you need when somebody disputes a payslip from 2024.
Decimal arithmetic throughout, and statutory tables versioned by law.
Salary changes, bank details, terminations and bulk edits all need a person to approve them, and every one leaves a trail showing who did what and when. Audits stop being an archaeology project.
High-risk actions confirmed against the exact change being made, then logged.
Fair Source
Cayamanan is licensed FSL-1.1-ALv2, the Functional Source License. For a Filipino business wanting to run its own HR and payroll, it costs nothing.
The one restriction exists so the project can be given away without someone else reselling it out from under the people maintaining it. Fair Source is not Open Source today. Every version becomes Open Source on a clock.
Two years after each release, that version converts to Apache 2.0 with no restrictions at all.
Run it yourself
No sales call, no trial key, no seat count. Clone it, start it, and the seed prints its own demo credentials.
terminal
docker compose up -d # Postgres and Redis
npm install
npm run db:migrate
npm run db:seed # demo tenant, company and logins
npm run devThen open http://localhost:3000
Writing
August 11, 2026 · 2 min read
Most Philippine SMEs keep their 201 files in a workbook that has grown for years. You can move that into Cayamanan today, columns and all, and the import will do the tedious part of the mapping for you.
July 28, 2026 · 2 min read
Cayamanan is AI-first, and an LLM still does not get to decide what lands in someone’s payslip. Those two statements are not in tension. Here is where the line sits and why it is drawn in code rather than in a policy document.
July 14, 2026 · 2 min read
Statutory tables change. Contribution schedules get revised. If a payroll run from March recomputes differently in November, the payslip you handed someone was a guess. Here is how Cayamanan makes that impossible.
Questions
A full HRIS for Philippine businesses, covering recruitment, the 201 file, contracts and compensation, payroll, time and leave, benefits and self-service in one system. It is free to run and self-hosted, with an AI assistant that works across all of it.
Yes. A Filipino business can run its entire HR operation on it and pay nothing, forever, on any number of employees. It is licensed FSL-1.1-ALv2, a Fair Source license. The only restriction is that you cannot resell Cayamanan itself as a competing commercial product.
That is what the payroll module exists for, and it is the part still being built. The statutory tables are versioned by law so a finalized run recomputes to the identical centavo years later. Payroll is milestone four. Employee records and organization structure are usable today.
Yes, for employee records. If you keep your 201 files in spreadsheets, you can import them from CSV or Excel today, keep them in Cayamanan, and let the assistant work on them. Contracts and payroll are not ready yet, and the status section on this page is kept honest about that.
No, and it never will. Deterministic software is authoritative for every payroll amount. The assistant explains, flags and assists, but it does not compute the amount. An LLM does not get to decide what lands in someone’s payslip.
Wherever you run it. Cayamanan is self-hosted, so your employee and payroll data sits in your own Postgres database on your own infrastructure. Tenant isolation is enforced by the database with row-level security that fails closed rather than by application code alone.
Node 22 or newer, Docker, and an OpenAI API key for the assistant. Everything else comes up with docker compose. The seed script creates a demo tenant, company and logins so you can look around before importing anything real.
Most HR products sold here were written for another country’s rules and adapted afterwards, so Philippine specifics like the 201 file, MPF, WISP, night differential and 13th month arrive as configuration on top of a foreign model. Cayamanan starts from the Philippine rules, which is a different foundation, not a different feature list.
iBAS Software FR. The architecture is still moving and the project is early, so issues and discussion are welcome. Please open an issue before a large pull request so the shape can be agreed first.
Contact
Questions about running it, moving your records across, or what is coming next. There is no sales team to get past.
Message us on either. Useful across the time difference between Manila and Rouen.
iBAS Software FR
9 Rue du Renard
76000 Rouen
France
iBAS Software Inc
194 C Benitez, BF Homes
1700 Parañaque
Philippines
Import them, keep them, and let Missy work on them. Nothing to buy, nothing to cancel, and the payroll engine is being built underneath you.