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Absence Management

Breathe

UK / wider Europe Report an error

Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Centurion Management Systems Ltd · www.breathehr.com

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Breathe: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Breathe: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Breathe at a glance

Vendor
Centurion Management Systems Ltd
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026
Starting price
“Starting at £24 a month per business” (vendor’s words) source, captured 13 Oct 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Breathe 1.5/5, the mean of 6 judges. Breathe, an absence management product from Centurion Management Systems Ltd of Horsham, England, is strongest where its evidence is thickest: requests and approvals and payroll handover both score 4, with the minimum and maximum equal. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 13 Oct 2026; evaluated by the panel 15 Oct 2026. all sources

Breathe alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Payroll Accountant

Weighted verdict

Closes payroll in DATEV every month and corrects whatever arrived late. Wants absences exported with the right payroll codes, the eAU result attached to the sick day, the six-week continued-pay limit counted per illness, and past months locked once they are paid.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Payroll Accountant

Panel median The Payroll Accountant This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Payroll Accountant
Entitlements & German leave rules 1 of 5 1 of 5
Requests, approvals & team calendar 2 of 5 2 of 5
Sick leave, eAU & continued pay 1 of 5 1 of 5
Payroll handover, time tracking & API 2 of 5 2 of 5
Health data, access & works council 1.5 of 5 1.5 of 5
European sovereignty 0 of 5 0.5 of 5

Entitlements & German leave rules

How this is scored

Whether the tool computes leave the way German and Austrian law and contracts do: entitlements per contract and working-time model, part-time proration, carry-over and expiry with the required notice, public holidays per federal state, half days and hourly leave, and special leave types.

0 — A fixed number of days per person typed in by hand; no carry-over, no proration and no public holidays.

3 — Annual entitlements and national public holidays, with carry-over as a manual adjustment and no statement on part-time or regional holidays.

5 — Entitlements per employee with automatic proration for joiners, leavers and part-time working days, public holidays per German federal state or Austrian region, half days, configurable carry-over with an expiry date, and custom leave types.

8 — Several working-time models per employee with changes over time recalculated, hourly leave, carry-over expiry with automatic notices to employees before leave lapses, special leave and parental leave types with their own rules, and entitlement changes logged.

10 — Leave law modelled and documented: entitlement rules per contract or collective agreement, statutory minimum and contractual leave kept apart where they expire differently, balances recalculated retroactively with an audit trail, and the rules a tool applies published in its help centre.

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The Payroll Accountant

Holiday entitlement tracking is automatic and the vendor publishes a free calculator for part-time and mid-year allowances, but that calculator sits on the website rather than being documented product behaviour. I found no public information on carry-over, regional public holidays, half days, or any German or Austrian leave rules, so nothing here would stand up in a German payroll audit. 1 3

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Requests, approvals & team calendar

How this is scored

The everyday flow: an employee requests leave on a phone, the right person approves, a substitute is named, and the team can plan around it — judged on configurable approval chains and on what colleagues are allowed to see.

0 — Leave requested by email or in a shared calendar; no approval step and no record of who approved.

3 — Requests with a single approver and a team calendar, but no substitutes, no blocking rules and every absence reason visible to everyone.

5 — Mobile requests and approvals, approvers per team or department, substitutes named on the request, a team calendar that shows absence without the reason, email or push notifications, and calendar sync.

8 — Multi-level approval chains, minimum staffing rules or blackout periods, delegation while the approver is away, configurable calendar visibility per role, Microsoft Teams or Slack integration, and every request, approval and cancellation logged.

10 — Approval logic that matches a real organisation: rules per location, team and leave type, conflicts checked against staffing and shift plans before approval, a complete history per request, and reporting on pending and overdue approvals.

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The Payroll Accountant

Requests in a few clicks, manager approval from a dashboard, a shared team calendar, email and in-app notifications, iOS and Android apps, and Outlook calendar sync are all shown. I found no public information on substitutes, multi-level approval chains, staffing or blackout rules, or whether colleagues can see the reason behind an absence. 3 6 8

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Sick leave, eAU & continued pay

How this is scored

Sick notifications and the German electronic certificate of incapacity: whether the tool retrieves the eAU from the health insurer itself or through a named payroll system, how sick days are counted towards the six-week continued-pay and BEM thresholds, and how child-sick days and certificates from private insurance are handled.

0 — Sickness recorded as another leave type with no word on the eAU, certificates or thresholds.

3 — A sick-leave type with a document upload, and "eAU" mentioned without saying who retrieves it or how.

5 — Sick notification by the employee in the app, the eAU retrieval process documented — by the tool itself or via a named payroll system — with the retrieval status visible to HR, and child-sick days as a separate type.

8 — eAU retrieval from the statutory health insurers documented end to end with the certified software named, retrieval results written back to the absence, sick days counted towards the six-week continued-pay limit per illness, BEM thresholds flagged to HR only, and paper certificates for privately insured employees handled.

10 — Sick leave handled as the regulated process it is: eAU retrieval automated with error and follow-up handling, continued-pay and sickness-benefit transitions tracked, BEM invitation workflow supported, reasons and documents restricted to named roles, and the whole process documented in the help centre.

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The Payroll Accountant

Sickness is tracked as its own type with fit-note upload, return-to-work logging and Bradford Factor trigger alerts, which is a British absence-management pattern backed by a UK sick report. I found no public information on eAU retrieval, the six-week continued-pay limit counted per illness, BEM, or child sick days, so no sick certificate would reach my payroll run from these pages. 3 9

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Payroll handover, time tracking & API

How this is scored

Getting absences into the payroll run with the right codes and keeping balances consistent with time tracking: exports or integrations for the payroll systems German companies use, time-account interaction, and an API.

0 — No export beyond a screen list; absences are retyped into payroll.

3 — A CSV or Excel export of absences per month, with no named payroll system and no API.

5 — A documented export or integration for DATEV (LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt) or another named German payroll system, absence types mapped to payroll codes, and a documented API.

8 — Several named payroll integrations, absence and overtime balances shared with time tracking, configurable payroll codes per leave type, monthly closing that locks past periods, webhooks, and an API with published limits.

10 — Payroll handover that closes the month: absences, sick days and eAU results delivered to payroll in its own format with corrections flagged, a period lock with an audit trail, a versioned API with a deprecation policy, and the full absence history exportable at contract end.

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The Payroll Accountant

The payroll export produces four CSV files — employee, salary, benefit and additional payment details — with a full or changes-only download, alongside an open API with a sandbox and a named Xero Payroll integration. I see no absences among the four named export files and no mapping of leave types to payroll codes, and I found no public information on DATEV or any other German payroll system, webhooks, or a monthly period lock. 2 7 8

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Health data, access & works council

How this is scored

What the tool does with data that is health data in law: who can see a sickness reason or certificate, how long absence records are kept, whether access is logged, and whether the vendor documents what a works agreement on absence recording needs.

0 — Nothing stated about who sees sick data or how long absences are kept.

3 — Roles for employees, managers and admins, but sickness reasons and documents visible to managers by default, and no retention setting.

5 — Sick-leave reasons and certificates restricted to HR by configurable permissions, colleagues see only "absent", retention or deletion of absence records configurable, and a DPA available.

8 — Field-level permissions per leave type, access to health-related records logged, retention rules per record type with automatic deletion, employees able to see their own records, and documentation aimed at works councils or a works agreement.

10 — Health data governed and evidenced: Art. 9 GDPR processing explained per feature, deletion runs logged and reportable, audit logs exportable, no analytics or AI features run on sickness data without explicit configuration, and the vendor publishing a template or checklist for the works agreement.

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The Payroll Accountant

The privacy policy keeps personal information only for as long as necessary, lists data subject rights and promises no third-party disclosure without consent, but nothing states who may see a sickness reason or certificate beyond a manager dashboard that monitors absence and sickness. I found no public information on HR-only permissions for health data, configurable retention for absence records, access logging, a DPA, or works council documentation — and Breathe AI is in early access with no statement on the data it processes. 1 4 5 8

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where absence and sickness data lives, who the contracting entity is, and who the subprocessors are — including email, push-notification and support providers. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, hosting unstated, and subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU hosting offered as an option while the contracting entity is non-EU, or the subprocessor list is absent.

5 — EU hosting as standard and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — email, push notifications, analytics or support — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — EU hosting on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published with locations, and a DPA that covers sickness data as special-category processing.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor European, and certification published.

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The Payroll Accountant

The support address places the vendor in Horsham, United Kingdom, and the marketing is addressed to UK SMEs, so the contracting entity sits outside the EU on the face of the pages. I found no public information on where absence and sickness data is hosted, on group ownership, or on any subprocessor for email, push notifications or support. 3 5

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the real annual cost from public pages alone: price per employee or per user, which features (eAU, payroll export, time tracking) sit in which tier, minimum users and the minimum term.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A starting price exists, but the pricing basis or which features it covers is unstated — the invoice is unknowable.

5 — Tier prices public with the pricing basis given, but at least one commonly needed piece (eAU, payroll export, time tracking, extra admins) is unpriced or "on request".

8 — Every tier priced publicly with its basis, add-on prices listed, minimum users, minimum term and VAT treatment given.

10 — Complete price computability: the annual invoice derivable for a given headcount and feature set, with every add-on, setup fee and overage published.

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The Payroll Accountant

The captured pricing page lists feature bundles, optional modules and support promises, but no price figure appears in the captured material — only a separate free holiday calculator. I found no public information on per-employee or per-user prices, which tier carries the payroll export, minimum users, contract term or VAT treatment, so a buyer cannot compute an annual invoice from these pages. 1 2 3

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined — uncited Report an error

Questions about Breathe

Is Breathe European?

Yes, though not from the EU. whats-best.ai classifies Breathe as UK / wider Europe.

Where does Breathe store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

Does Breathe have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 13 Oct 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Breathe?

As of 15 Oct 2026, the panel rates Kenjo (3/5), flair (2.5/5) and HRlab (2.5/5) highest among the other 16 Absence Management products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is Kenjo (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Breathe alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Do you know more about Breathe? Tell us Report an error on this page

Sources (9)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor homepage www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Pricing page www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Absence management www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Privacy policy www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Terms of use www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Requests, approvals & team calendar — found from sitemap www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Payroll handover, time tracking & API — found from sitemap www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Payroll handover, time tracking & API — found from sitemap www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Sick leave, eAU & continued pay — found from sitemap www.breathehr.com Checked 13 Oct 2026 Details →