How to choose HR software in Romania: types, criteria and compliance

Good HR software does not show itself in the demo, but in the third month: when you close the timesheets without counting hours by hand, when you generate the payroll registers without correcting them four times, and when an ITM (Labour Inspectorate) check finds the record of hours up to date. For a company in Romania, the choice is not only about features, but about how well the software gets on with local legislation, which changes often. Here is how to filter the offers.

The types of solution on the market

Not all “HR” software solves the same problem. In practice, you come across a few categories:

• Legacy systems — old applications, often desktop-based, robust at payroll but cumbersome, with interfaces from another era and difficult migration. They do the job, but adoption within the team is slow.
• Fragmented suites — one module from one vendor, another from a second: time tracking separate from payroll, leave in a third tool. Each piece works, but you do the integration yourself, in Excel, at every month-end.
• Cheap solutions with limited support — attractive on price, but without fast legislative updates and without anyone on the phone when you have a payroll emergency.
• International platforms — strong at recruitment and performance management, but they rarely cover Romanian payroll, D112 or REGES natively. The localisation is superficial.
• Specialised, integrated platforms — built for the local market, with time tracking, Romanian payroll and compliance in one place.

Each has its place. A corporation with 3,000 employees and a dedicated payroll team can tolerate a legacy system; an SME with 40 people and a single HR person cannot.

The criteria that really matter

Beyond the feature list, four things decide whether the software takes hold in the company:

1. The interface and adoption. If employees cannot work out for themselves how to request leave, you have moved the work onto HR’s shoulders rather than automating it. Simple onboarding is more valuable than an exotic feature.
2. Support in Romanian. When you have a problem with the payroll register the day before payday, you want to speak to someone who understands both the law and the language. Local support is not a whim.
3. Data migration. How do your current employees, contracts and history get in? A bad import at the start poisons everything afterwards.
4. Legislative flexibility. Romanian legislation moves. The gross minimum wage, for example, rises to 4,325 lei from 1 July 2026 (HG 146/2026, a government decision). Serious software delivers such updates without charging you separately every time.

The functional coverage to check

Make a list of what you will actually use, not of what sounds good in the brochure. For an SME, the useful minimum means:

• Recruitment and onboarding — from the job ad to the first contract, with documents generated rather than typed from scratch.
• Multi-method time tracking — physical kiosk, mobile app, QR code, NFC card. The reality of a company with field, office and remote staff does not fit into a single method.
• Leave and absences — requests, approvals, an up-to-date balance, with no emails going missing.
• Shifts and schedules — planning for teams that do not work 9–17.
• Remote and hybrid work — an accurate record regardless of where the person sits.
• Contracts — generation, signing, archiving, with a history of changes.

Romanian compliance: the non-negotiable part

This is where good software parts ways with software made “in general”. In Romania, you have concrete obligations that the software must cover:

• REGES-ONLINE — the new general register of employee records (HG 295/2025) replaced the old Revisal. The software must transmit correctly into the new system, or through a connection to the Labour Inspectorate portal.
• The Labour Code (Codul Muncii) — art. 119 requires the employer to keep a daily record of the hours worked by each employee, with the start and end time. Failure to comply is penalised with a fine (check the threshold currently in force). Digital time tracking answers exactly this requirement.
• ITM checks — the record must be up to date and ready to present at the inspection, not reconstructed in a panic.
• ROI and a digital condică — the internal regulation (regulamentul de ordine interioară) and the attendance record (condica), kept electronically, easy to show and to audit.

The law does not prescribe a format for the condică — you can keep the record on paper or electronically — but the electronic format is the one that survives an inspection without drama.

The Romanian elements payroll depends on

International software that is brilliant at CV screening is of no help to you if it does not know:

• Romanian payroll — CAS (the pension contribution), CASS (the health contribution), CAM (the employer’s labour insurance contribution) and income tax, calculated correctly and updated for tax changes.
• D112 — the declaration on social contributions, income tax and the register of insured persons, filed monthly by the 25th of the following month. Ideally generated directly from the software.
• Export to accounting — including formats compatible with programs used locally (SAGA, for example), so that payroll flows through to accounting without manual re-keying.
• GDPR taken seriously — personnel data is sensitive: encryption, access control and proper retention, not just a tick in the footer.

Red flags not to overlook

• No local support, in Romanian.
• No legislative updates included, or an unpredictable separate cost for them.
• No native REGES / D112 — you will do them by hand, which means paying for the software and still doing the work.
• Unclear migration, or migration contracted separately and expensively.
• “Localisation” that means only a translated menu, not Romanian tax logic.

Where Workly sits

Workly is built as a platform with real breadth, not as an isolated module: multi-method time tracking (including a QR kiosk and NFC cards), Romanian payroll with export to accounting, plus stock, assets, helpdesk and commercial contracts — in one place, with native Romanian compliance (REGES, the Labour Code, D112) and local support in Romanian. The difference from a fragmented suite is felt at month-end, when data no longer has to be pasted by hand between tools.

On the internal assistance side, Modi is a deterministic assistant: it does not use an external language model, so it cannot “invent” answers — it gives the information from your company’s rules and data, it does not guess. For HR questions and internal procedures, that means answers you can rely on.

If you want to see what one concrete part of the calculation looks like, you can start with the 2026 net salary calculator and then discuss how the rest of the modules connect.

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Informational article, accurate at the date of publication. Not tax or legal advice. Always check the values and deadlines at source (ANAF, the Labour Inspectorate, MMSS) or with a specialist, as the legislation may change.