What HR digitalisation means for a Romanian SME, how to spot a half-finished one, and why compliance turns it from an option into a necessity.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
Until recently, “HR digitalisation” sounded like a luxury project — something for corporations with their own IT departments. For an SME with 20-150 employees, the reality looks different: the time records sit in a notebook or in an Excel file that only one person knows how to fill in correctly, leave is approved over WhatsApp, and personnel files are a physical drawer plus a few scattered folders on a laptop. It is not a strategic choice, it is an accumulation of workarounds that, at some point, costs more than a platform would.
HR digitalisation is not a single step, but the gradual move of recurring processes out of paper and separate files into a single system with clear rules:
The difference is not cosmetic. A time-tracking spreadsheet has no change log, alerts nobody when a day is missing, and does not connect to payroll. A platform does all that automatically and removes the typical error that appears when the same data is copied by hand several times over.
Many companies believe they “do not need” digitalisation because they have managed for years with the current system. The problem is that “managing” and “working efficiently” are not the same thing. A quick self-assessment check:
If the answer to 2-3 of these questions is unclear, the gap between how digitalised you think your company is and how digitalised it actually is already has a financial and operational impact — not merely a theoretical one.
Any well-thought-out digitalisation initiative usually pursues three directions: the employee experience (self-service access to their own file, leave balance, certificates and payslips, without depending on someone in HR being available); simplified processes (fewer manual steps, less data copied from one file into another, fewer approvals lost in an inbox); and transparency (management sees in real time who is present, who is on leave, what the current salary costs are and where deviations appear, without asking HR for ad-hoc reports every time).
The move towards cloud solutions, accessible from a browser or from mobile apps, has been the dominant trend in recent years, and not by accident. It removes the need for internal IT infrastructure, allows access from anywhere (useful for staff without a fixed desk — warehouse, production, field) and makes compliance updates possible without manual intervention. Self-service reduces the volume of repetitive requests to HR.
If the general trend convinces some companies, legal compliance convinces the rest. Romania has a reporting framework that changes frequently and penalises errors: e-Factura (electronic invoicing), REGES (the electronic register of employee records), the D112 return, integration with accounting systems such as SAGA. Keeping these flows by hand is risky — a reporting error or a late REGES submission is not just an administrative inconvenience, it is a risk of penalty. In this context, digitalisation becomes the minimum infrastructure through which a company stays compliant without extra effort at every legislative change.
A frequent trap: the company migrates partially — time tracking in one app, leave in another, payroll still in Excel — and ends up with fragmented processes instead of a unified one, with duplicated data and contradictory sources of truth. On top of that comes a more serious risk — unencrypted personal data (PII), kept in shared files with no access control. Half-finished digitalisation can leave a company more exposed than the purely paper version, precisely because digital data travels more easily.
An HR platform handles, by its very nature, sensitive data — CNP (the personal numeric code), address, medical data linked to sick leave, contractual information. Real GDPR compliance means: encryption of personal data, both at rest and in transit; clearly defined retention periods, aligned to legal obligations; and automatic purging at the end of the retention period — the actual deletion of data that no longer has a legal basis for being kept, not simply archiving it indefinitely. Many companies get stuck at the first point and ignore purging entirely — and so accumulate, over years, data the law no longer allows them to keep.
Digitalisation does not end with the technical implementation. Real adoption depends on onboarding — employees have to understand in minutes how they clock in or how they ask for a day off. For staff without a fixed desk, a physical kiosk solution simplifies clocking in, with no personal phone and no complicated login. And local support, in Romanian, makes the difference between adoption and abandonment when an urgent question comes up about a salary calculation.
Workly was built starting from exactly the fragmentation described above: instead of separate apps for time tracking, leave, payroll and documents, it offers a single platform covering the core modules — time tracking, leave, Romanian payroll with SAGA export, contracts and personnel files — plus related operations such as stock and asset management, which few HR solutions include natively. For staff without a fixed desk, Workly provides a physical kiosk with a rotating QR code and NFC card, so that clocking in does not depend on the employee’s personal phone. On the security side, personal data is encrypted, and retention and automatic purging are treated as part of the architecture rather than a manual process bolted on later — a complete digitalisation, with a single source of truth for all the company’s HR data.
If you want to see what this looks like applied to your own company, you can request a demo.
This article is for general information purposes and does not constitute legal or tax advice. For decisions on GDPR compliance, REGES/D112 reporting or other legal obligations specific to your company, we recommend consulting a specialist or an authorised consultant.
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