This evaluation looks specifically at whether Access People HR holds up as OKR software for finance and FP&A teams who need OKR outcomes to feed back into headcount models, board-level KPIs, and budget variance analysis.
The short answer: it's functional for basic goal tracking inside HR. It falls apart when you need OKR data to move.
What People HR Actually Offers on OKRs
Access People HR's performance module includes goal-setting, appraisal workflows, and manager check-ins. These features exist — they're just not structured around OKR methodology.
A proper OKR system enforces a clear hierarchy: Company Objective → Department Key Results → Individual Key Results, each with quantified targets and confidence scores. People HR's goal module is more flexible than that, which sounds good until you realize that flexibility usually means "nobody uses it consistently" inside six months.
There's no enforced OKR framework. You can label your goals anything you want, which means a team of 80 people will end up with 80 different interpretations of what a "key result" is. Dedicated OKR tools like Leapsome or Perdoo build that structure into the data model itself. People HR does not.
According to G2 reviews as of Q1 2026, People HR scores 4.3/5 overall but performance management specifically pulls lower ratings — users frequently cite limited configurability in the goal-setting module and clunky progress tracking.
The Data Portability Problem
This is where it gets genuinely painful for FP&A.
Your OKR program is supposed to connect strategic priorities to measurable financial outcomes. When you're building a headcount model and you need to tie hiring pace to the sales capacity OKR, or when you're doing a quarterly board pack and the CFO asks which OKRs are at risk vs. on-track by department — you need that data out of the system and into your model.
People HR's export functionality is limited to CSV exports from HR record views, not from the performance module in any structured way. There's no API endpoint your Sheets model can query directly. You're copy-pasting, which in a 12-tab model means you've now introduced a manual step that breaks every time someone forgets to update it.
Compare that to a dedicated OKR tool with a REST API: you can pull current key result progress into a named range, wire it against your departmental P&L assumptions, and have it refresh automatically. People HR isn't there.
Where It Makes Sense (and Where It Doesn't)
Use People HR's goal module if:
- Your OKR program is owned by HR, not Finance, and lives primarily as a performance review input
- You have fewer than 100 employees and don't need OKR data flowing into financial models
- You already use People HR as your HRIS and want basic goal visibility without paying for another tool
Don't use it as your OKR platform if:
- You need cascading OKRs from board level down to team level with enforced structure
- Finance owns or co-owns the OKR process and needs progress data in Sheets or Excel
- You're running quarterly OKR reviews that feed into rolling forecasts
- You want confidence scoring, real-time check-in tracking, or OKR grading at cycle close
For a mid-size company with a genuine OKR program — where the CFO is reviewing objective progress alongside the P&L each quarter — People HR's performance module is not the right infrastructure. You'd end up maintaining a parallel Sheets tracker anyway, which defeats the purpose entirely.
If you're already building OKR frameworks directly in Sheets, the article on OKR creation in Google Sheets for FP&A covers how to structure that data model so it stays linked to your financial assumptions.
Pricing and Deployment Context
Access People HR pricing is quote-based and varies by employee count and modules selected. From what's publicly available as of May 2026, SME packages typically run in the £5–9 per employee per month range in the UK market, with the performance management module included in mid-tier plans. US pricing is less transparent.
For context: dedicated OKR tools like Perdoo start around $8–9/user/month, Leapsome runs $8+/user/month, and WorkBoard is enterprise-priced. If you're already paying for People HR as your HRIS, the goal-setting feature has no incremental cost — which is the main reason teams end up trying to make it work.
The economic case only holds if your OKR requirements are genuinely lightweight. The moment Finance needs structured data export, the cost of manual workarounds — analyst time reconciling CSVs into the headcount model — exceeds what you'd spend on a proper tool.
Integration with Financial Models: The Missing Layer
No native connection between People HR and Google Sheets exists as of May 2026. There's no official Sheets add-on, no Zapier integration for OKR progress data, and no webhook support for performance module events.
What this means practically: if your quarterly process includes updating the board pack with OKR progress by department, someone is manually exporting data from People HR and pasting it into =SUMIFS('Headcount'!D:D, 'Headcount'!B:B, "Engineering") style tables. That's a manual point of failure in a model where everything else is linked.
For FP&A teams running a proper three-statement model alongside OKR tracking — where changes to key result assumptions feed into the revenue projection on the P&L tab — you need either a dedicated OKR tool with API access, or you build the OKR layer inside Sheets itself.
This is actually where ModelMonkey helps: connecting People HR data exports (or any HR data source) directly into your Google Sheets model through natural language queries, so the OKR status table on your KPIs tab stays refreshable rather than static. Try ModelMonkey free for 14 days — it works in both Google Sheets and Excel.
The Honest Verdict
People HR is a solid HRIS for SMEs. Its performance management module is adequate for companies where OKRs are primarily a people management and appraisal input. For those teams, the zero incremental cost is real and the argument for using it is reasonable.
For FP&A-driven OKR programs — where objective progress links to financial forecasts, where the CFO reviews OKR health alongside EBITDA variance, and where goal data needs to move between systems — People HR leaves a gap that your team will fill with spreadsheets regardless. Better to design that Sheets layer intentionally from the start than to discover it after two quarters of painful manual reconciliation.