HRMS Rollout for Growing Team
Replaced spreadsheet HR tracking with a centralized system for employee records, leave, and approvals.
- Industry
- Professional services
- Location
- UK
- Timeline
- 10 weeks
By the numbers
- 85%
- Leave approvals completed same-day
- 120
- Employees moved off spreadsheets
- Days → minutes
- Audit preparation time
- 1
- System of record for all HR data
The problem
A professional services firm grew from 40 to 120 employees in two years. HR still managed records in shared spreadsheets and email threads. Leave balances were frequently wrong because updates happened in multiple files. Managers approved time off via email with no audit trail. New hires waited days for proper records. Leadership could not pull headcount or leave liability reports without manual consolidation that took a full day every month.
What we built
We deployed a custom HRMS tailored to their approval hierarchy — employee profiles, leave requests with manager workflows, document storage, and HR admin dashboards. The system became the single source of truth for workforce data, replacing five disconnected spreadsheets and the email approval chain.
Our approach
- Interviewed HR, managers, and employees to map current leave and records workflows
- Migrated existing employee data from spreadsheets with validation and deduplication
- Built role-based access — staff, managers, HR admin, and leadership views
- Configured leave types, accrual rules, and approval chains matching company policy
- Trained HR and managers with live walkthroughs before company-wide rollout
- Ran parallel tracking for one pay cycle to verify leave balances matched
Results & outcomes
- Single source of truth for 120 employee records — no duplicate spreadsheets
- Leave approval time dropped from 2–3 days to same-day for 85% of requests
- Monthly headcount and leave reports generated in minutes instead of a full day
- Audit-ready history of who approved what and when
- New hire records complete on day one instead of chasing updates for a week
85% same-day leave approvals
Analysis
Spreadsheet HR breaks at scale in predictable ways: balances drift wrong, approvals get lost in email, and audits become archaeology. Centralizing 120 employees into one system of record fixed the data-integrity problem first; the same-day approval rate is a downstream effect of moving approvals out of inboxes and into a tracked workflow. Audit time collapsing from days to minutes is the clearest ROI for a professional-services firm, where billable hours spent reconciling HR records are pure loss.
Related product
A human resource management system that centralizes employee profiles, leave requests, and HR workflows so administrators and managers can act on accurate records without chasing updates by email.
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