Clear symptoms that HR records kept in Excel have become a risk: duplicate data, time tracking errors, late REGES filings, GDPR neglected. When to move to dedicated software.
Translated from Romanian. This article covers Romanian labour and tax law; the Romanian version is canonical and is updated first.
At 8-10 employees, a well-kept Excel file covers almost everything. At 30, the same file starts to come apart at the seams: a row deleted by accident, a formula broken by someone who was “just checking something”, two versions of the same summary circulating by email. Excel does not suddenly turn bad — the company grows past it. Here are the clear signs you have reached that point.
A few recurring situations show clearly that Excel has fallen behind the company:
Beyond the individual errors, Excel has a fundamental problem: it keeps no verifiable history. A cell can be changed by anyone, at any time, with no trace of who changed what and when. If an employee disputes a leave day, or an inspection asks for proof of the hours recorded in a given month, “we changed it, but we do not know exactly who” is not an answer for an inspector.
Here we are no longer talking about convenience, but about concrete compliance required of employers in Romania:
Excel holds a balance, but it does not manage the process behind it well. The legal minimum is 20 working days of annual leave per year, and alongside it there is sick leave, short time off and unpaid leave — each with different calculation rules and a different impact on pay. An up-to-date balance is hard to maintain by hand when requests arrive by email, on WhatsApp and verbally, and someone has to add them up correctly every month. An error in a balance is not just an administrative nuisance — it can end up in an employment dispute if the employee challenges the calculation.
An HR spreadsheet usually contains CNPs, salaries, sometimes sick leave records — personal data, some of it sensitive. It is worth having a clear answer to: who has access to the file and why, whether it is encrypted or merely “hidden” in a folder, and what happens to a former employee’s data once the retention period has passed. A file shared by email or on a common drive, without granular access control and without deletion at term, is hard to defend in a serious GDPR audit.
There is no universal magic number, but a few factors signal that the threshold is close: headcount passes 20-30 and every manual change becomes visibly slower; shifts appear (shift work, weekends, nights) that are hard to follow in a static table; the company becomes multi-site, with each work site keeping “its own version” of the records; or errors become more frequent, discovered only at month-end close. If you recognise two or more of these signs, the conversation about dedicated software is no longer premature.
Not every HR system solves the problem — especially one designed for another market. For a company in Romania, check the minimum:
Workly ties the symptoms above directly to the obligations it covers: time tracking is done through a kiosk with a rotating QR code or an NFC card, producing a real daily record that satisfies the requirement of article 119 of the Labour Code, rather than a summary reconstructed afterwards. Leave has automatically calculated balances, digital requests and approvals, with no emails going missing. Romanian payroll produces the payroll register and exports directly in SAGA format — from where the accountant files D112 — while contracts and their changes flow into REGES from the same data source: the employee file, not a separate spreadsheet.
For internal HR questions and procedures, the Modi assistant is deterministic — it does not use an external language model, so it cannot “invent” an answer. It replies from your company’s real rules and data, which matters a great deal when the subject is leave balances or internal policies you cannot afford to guess at.
As a concrete starting point, you can try the 2026 net salary calculator to see what a correct calculation looks like, then discuss how the remaining modules fit your company’s workflow.
Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. Always check current values, deadlines and penalty thresholds at source (the Labour Inspectorate, ANAF) or with a specialist, as the legislation may change.
How to spot exhaustion in your team using data you already have — overtime, untaken leave, absence patterns — and what a small business can do about it.
Compare the three payroll models: in-house team, SaaS software and full outsourcing. Criteria on cost, control, compliance risk and the right moment for each one.
A practical guide to internal reskilling in an SME: when it costs less than recruiting, what changes in the employment contract and what duties arise when the job duties change.
We'll show you how time tracking, payroll and the rest of the modules work for your company, in a short demo.
Request a demo