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Dakila

Architecture and data.

If you are the person who will be called when something breaks at eleven at night, the answers are below.

Where the data lives

On your hardware, inside your network. Employee records, salary data and PDS disclosures are written to a database on a machine your agency owns. There is no vendor cloud, no replica in another jurisdiction, and no telemetry carrying personnel data out of the building.

This is not a configuration option we could quietly reverse. The product is built for on-premise deployment, and it is designed to work on a network with no internet access at all — down to fonts, which are compiled into the application rather than fetched at runtime.

Inside your agency, on hardware you own

  1. Staff browsers

    Desktop and phone. No installed app, no device management policy.

  2. The Dakila application

    Authorises every request against the signed-in user's role before answering it.

  3. The database

    Personnel records, salary data, PDS disclosures. The whole system of record, in one place.

The internet

Nothing above reaches down here while the system is running. Not for an update, not for a licence check, not for a font.

Who actually runs it

We do. On your machines.

The usual objection to on-premise software is fair: it hands your ICT office a stack they did not choose and did not staff for. So we do not hand it over. Dakila is deployed, upgraded, backed up and monitored by us, under a support agreement, on infrastructure your agency owns and controls.

Your ICT office keeps the keys, the network and the data. It does not have to become a Python and MariaDB shop to keep HR running.

What that covers

  • Initial deployment and configuration against your agency's structure.
  • Version upgrades, applied and verified before they reach your users.
  • Backup configuration and restore testing.
  • Monitoring, with a named escalation path.
  • Your ICT office retains full administrative access throughout. Nothing is hidden from you on your own servers.

How it is built

Dakila is a modern web application over a mature open-source HR and payroll engine. We did not write a payroll engine from scratch, because payroll correctness is earned over years of production use across thousands of deployments, not in a project timeline.

What we built is everything above it: the interface your employees use, the government modules that engine does not have, and the Philippine statutory layer. The engine is commodity. The experience and the localisation are the product.

We run that engine unmodified. No patches, no forks, no edits to its core. That is a deliberate discipline: a forked engine cannot be safely upgraded, and an agency that cannot take a security update is an agency with a problem three years from now.

  • Browser only: desktop and mobile web. No app store, no device management policy to renegotiate, no separate mobile build to fall behind.
  • One database: a single system of record for HR. No second write-path, no reconciliation job, no two numbers that disagree at month end.
  • Open standards: every function is reachable over an authenticated REST API, so a future national HR system or your own reporting stack can integrate without our permission.

Access, audit and privacy

The rule we build to: hiding a button is not access control.

Every request is authorised on the server against the signed-in user’s role. Typing a URL for a screen you are not entitled to see does not work — not because the link was hidden, but because the server refuses. We test for this deliberately, by walking the whole application as an unprivileged account and recording every control left reachable.

  • Sign-in against your agency's own directory, wired up at deployment as configuration — the engine ships the integration; no custom build.
  • Role-based permissions enforced server-side on every request, not in the interface.
  • Login, export and print activity logged with the account and address that performed it.
  • Field-level change history on personnel records — who changed what, and when.
  • When an employee is separated, their access ends and their open sessions are terminated in the same action.
  • Personal data appears only on screens a role legitimately needs. HR sees what HR needs; colleagues do not browse each other's disclosures.

Data Privacy Act

An HRIS holds the most sensitive record set an agency keeps. We treat RA 10173 compliance as part of the engagement rather than a clause: a Privacy Impact Assessment before real employee data is loaded, a data sharing agreement where one is warranted, and contractual breach obligations on us. Because the system runs on your infrastructure, your agency remains the personal information controller throughout — the arrangement the law is easiest to satisfy under.

What happens if Dakila stops existing

The engine underneath is licensed under the GPL. There is no licence key, no activation server and no technical mechanism by which anyone — including us — could switch off a running installation. Your deployment keeps running. The complete source for the engine and for the government modules built on it is included with your deployment, and it is yours to keep, modify and have someone else maintain.