Personio acquires spend management platform Circula

Personio becomes the first European platform to unite HR, payroll, and spend management.

MUNICH, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Personio today announced it is joining forces with Circula, one of Europe's leading spend management platforms. More than 3,000 European mid-market businesses already trust Circula with their expenses, corporate cards, accounts payable and tax-optimised benefits.

"Spend management is one of the capabilities our customers ask us for most, and it's complex to get right in Europe. Just as with payroll rules change at every border. Over the past 9 years Circula has already solved that complexity in an intuitive and powerful way," says Hanno Renner, CEO and co-founder of Personio. "With Circula joining Personio, everything a company spends on its people–payroll, expenses and benefits–comes together under one roof. That's a first in Europe, and a big step towards Personio being the system European businesses run their entire workforce on."

The two companies have already worked closely together for several years, serving many of Personio's 16,000 European customers together. The acquisition makes that partnership permanent and enables an even deeper integration of data and business workflows. Their products meet exactly where payroll and spend connect. Expenses flow into payroll through both payroll integrations and Personio's native payroll engine, and each company has built deep compliance and tax expertise in its own domain, Personio in payroll and Circula in expenses and benefits.

Beyond their joint customer-base and focus on small and mid-sized organisations, Circula and Personio are also united in their commitment to making the lives of tax advisors easier. Both companies have built up a community of hundreds of tax advisors and have built features that facilitate the collaboration of tax advisors with their clients. One part of that strategy has been deep DATEV integrations which transfer data into DATEV's payroll and accounting systems. They will continue to be further developed and will over time seamlessly integrate into a single solution.

"Circula has solved syncing employee data between spend management and HR platform and hundreds of joint customers already use that integration. The unsolved part is that the tax logic on the expense side and on the payroll side has always been built by two different companies", says Nikolai Skatchkov, CEO and co-founder of Circula. "Joining forces with Personio today changes that. For our customers, DATEV stays, the existing integration stays, and expertise that Circula built stays. What changes is that HR, spend, and now payroll are designed to be one."

This is a natural evolution for Personio after successfully building a native payroll solution. Together, Personio and Circula aim to run all business spend – salary, benefits, expenses and corporate cards – in one integrated platform. For HR, that means less manual work and fewer systems. For finance, it means clean books and a faster close.

"Personio and Circula have been running side by side at Everphone for more than 6 years. We picked them deliberately: the strongest player in each category, connected through the existing integration. Payroll, cost centres and approvers were synced from day one, so two products never felt like two systems", says Veronika von Heise-Rotenburg, CFO of Everphone. "The next step, both growing closer together, is the one we have been waiting for."  

Circula will operate as Circula by Personio from October 6 and the team will join Personio. For joint customers the integration will deepen into a fully connected experience. For Circula customers that do not use Personio, the product will continue to be available and further developed as a standalone product.

About Personio

Personio is Europe's leading HR and payroll platform, used by more than 16,000 companies employing 1.6 million people. Founded in Munich in 2015, Personio has 6 offices in Europe with more than 1,500 employees. Personio helps organisations from 25-5000 employees run every part of HR from hiring to payroll, while equipping them to lead their organisations through the AI transformation ahead.

About Circula

Circula is the flexible expense management solution for finance teams, bringing together all business expenses in one modular platform – from expenses, travel costs, and corporate cards to employee benefits and accounts payable. Over 3,000 companies and 250,000 users rely on Circula to reduce manual effort and manage expense processes smoothly. Circula was founded in Berlin in 2017.