HR and payroll platform for a growing company
Payroll, leave and onboarding off spreadsheets for good
/ Overview
A company that had grown past sixty people was still running payroll, leave and onboarding across four spreadsheets and a shared inbox. We deployed a self-hosted HR platform, encoded their actual leave and payroll rules, and moved every employee record across in one weekend.
Discuss a build like this/ Project Details
Project: HR and payroll platform for a growing company
Client: Under NDA — reference available on request
Industry: HR technology
Engagement: Deployment & customisation engagement
Built on: HRM SaaS (HR and payroll tool) by WorkDo, licensed via CodeCanyon
/ Challenge
Payroll is unforgiving — a rounding error or a misapplied leave rule is a conversation with a real person about their salary. The client also had non-standard policies accumulated over years that no off-the-shelf SaaS would accommodate without expensive custom work.
/ Provided Services
Policy configuration
Leave types, accrual and carry-forward rules, salary components, deductions, statutory contributions and approval chains configured to match the client's real policy including its exceptions.
Data migration & parallel run
Employee master data, salary history and leave balances migrated, then three parallel payroll runs reconciled line by line against the legacy spreadsheets before cutover.
Self-service rollout
Employee portal for payslips, leave requests and document access, with role-based permissions so managers see their reports and nobody else.
/ Solution
We documented every existing rule first, including the undocumented exceptions, and had HR sign off on that document before touching configuration. Then we ran three parallel payroll cycles against the old spreadsheets until the numbers matched exactly, and only then switched over.
/ Tech stack
Laravel
Payroll calculation rules and approval workflows extended in Laravel, with the custom logic isolated so platform updates do not overwrite it.
MySQL
Self-hosted with encrypted backups and restricted database access — salary data never leaves infrastructure the client controls.
PDF & email pipeline
Automated payslip generation and distribution, with delivery logging so HR can prove what was sent and when.
/ Client's Feedback
The parallel-run approach is what sold us. They did not ask us to trust the new system — they proved it matched our numbers three months running before we switched anything.
Meera Iyer
Operations Director at Harborlight Clinics
