The Best HR Software for Small Business

If you think small businesses don’t need dedicated HR software, think again.

Most small businesses don’t have a large HR Department and even if they don’t have many employees either, things can easily go in the wrong direction. For example, there’s nobody to keep up with the latest changes in labor legislation. Or there’s not enough space to keep records on paper for each employee and valuable information gets lost. Or the only person in charge with time tracking and leave management has a day off. HR software can save you a lot of time and energy, eliminate human errors, and provide exquisite tools for managing the workforce.

The benefits of HR software for small businesses

Go paperless, get rid of Excel and Word files, and enter the digital era of HR software. To make things interesting, here’s a list of benefits HR software can bring to your company. Whether you manage a startup with growth potential or a small business you don’t plan to extend, these benefits will definitely catch your attention.

If you don’t think your company needs all these features, don’t worry. You can find dedicated HR software that solves one or more problems without trying to solve all the problems. Therefore, you can choose software for core HR and leave management, payroll, hiring, or performance reviews. By focusing on a specific area of HR, these apps became really good at their job and also easy to learn. Check out the following HR software for small businesses.

  • Up to date employee records that follow the entire period an employee works for your business
  • Time tracking and payroll integration
  • Homogeneous leave policies, easy to update
  • Leave management, tailored for your business
  • Performance analysis
  • Tools for recruiting new employees, easy integration, and resources management
  • Easy leave booking, task planning, and attendance tracking
  • Tools for growing the company’s culture
  • Collaboration tools integrated with other features to make things easy to learn and use
  • Up to date employee records that follow the entire period an employee works for your business
  • Time tracking and payroll integration
  • Homogeneous leave policies, easy to update
  • Leave management, tailored for your business
  • Performance analysis
  • Tools for recruiting new employees, easy integration, and resources management
  • Easy leave booking, task planning, and attendance tracking
  • Tools for growing the company’s culture
  • Collaboration tools integrated with other features to make things easy to learn and use.

LeaveBoard - HR software for small businesses

For Core HR and leave management, LeaveBoard is a great cloud software solution for small businesses. First of all, LeaveBoard manages everything related to employees’ time-off such as vacations, public holidays, and personal time-off. It also provides tools for booking leave days, managing multiple leave policies, and tracking absence.

Customers benefit of self-service functionalities, which means employees are responsible for booking and managing their time-off. You don’t need a big HR team because your employees can take care of themselves. A single HR manager can approve or decline requests, analyze attendance, and manage the workforce. Employee self-service reduces costs and increases work satisfaction.

The online HR system also offers accurate reports, integration with Slack, centralized employee records, and support for working with different time zones, leave policies, and calendars.

LeaveBoard highlights:

  • Shared attendance calendar
  • Custom leave policies
  • Employee self-service portals
  • Employee directory
  • Dynamic rules, automation and policies

LeaveBoard is free for a maximum of 9 employees. After that, it costs $13.5 /employee/year.

If you're looking to boost productivity, reduce time with updating paperwork, increase transparency and automate your HR processes, you need to test this solution.

HomeRun - Recruitment processes

If the recruitment process is your weak point, you may want to use dedicated HR software for recruitment such as HomeRun. HomeRun helps you post jobs, attract interesting candidates, and manage candidates throughout the entire hiring process. It automates the processes and increases the hiring rate and HR performance. For example, HomeRun provides tools for creating job posts using the required skills and the company’s culture as the main ingredients. It also eases your way through social media and automates the process of posting jobs.

For each candidate, HomeRun records CV, experience, contact details, the stage of the hiring process, interviews, and team notes. You’ll have all data in a single place and a wide perspective over each candidate.

Homerun highlights:

  • Visual hiring pipeline
  • Shared email inbox
  • Dedicated career page
  • Event scheduler
  • Team notes

HomeRun costs €69 per 3 job slots opening per month. You can prepay for a bunch of monthly job slots if you think you’ll have a busy period.

Here is what a recent customer said within a review website about Homerun:

  • Pros: Simple to use and straightforward. It has all the features a company like ours (20 empl.) needs.
  • Cons: The customization abilities of the career page can be enhanced to be even more flexible.

Alternatives we recommend: Workable, Greenhouse.

Gusto - Payroll

Gusto provides full-service payroll and employee finance tools that make things easier for you when it comes to managing money. It has over 100,000 clients and targets small businesses. Gusto helps you onboard, pay, insure, and support your team. It even deals with medical insurance and other benefits plans. Gusto automatically computes and files payroll taxes, provides time-tracking, and pays employees. It can run on Autopilot too, so you can take a day off without hesitation.

Gusto highlights:

  • Visual hiring pipeline
  • Shared email inbox
  • Dedicated career page
  • Event scheduler
  • Employee benefits
  • Team notes

Gusto’s pricing plans start for $19/month and go up to $149/month.

Alternatives: Quickbooks, Paycor, Xero.

Paycor - Payroll

Another software solution for payroll is Paycor. They offer an online solution for payroll and tax for medium and small businesses. You can access it from anywhere and it even has a mobile version. Paycor provides a flexible solution so you can adapt it to your needs. It also offers employee support and tax compliance assistance.  Like LeaveBoard, Paycor understands the power of employee self-service and gives employees access to their pay history and tax forms. The program also provides reports and analysis for ultimate payroll accuracy.

Paycor highlights:

  • Benefits Management
  • Federal and tax filing, 
  • Self-serve employee portal 
  • Mobile app for both employees and employers

However, Paycor’s features come with a price. For less than 40 employees, you can choose a pricing plan between $99/month and $199/month.

Culture Amp - Employee engagement

From time to time you’ll see how useful can be a digital solution designed to improve the company’s culture. Culture Amp is a people and culture platform that supports employees from their first day in the company. The program is responsible for employees’ work satisfaction, performance, and motivation. It provides diagnostics and dive surveys, evaluations, goal tracking, and reviews. You’ll have continuous feedback and be able to take action when needed. Culture Amp is focused on building an engaged and efficient team. Moreover, it helps you keep your employees, reduce work-related stress, and predict how employees will grow inside the company.

Culture Amp highlights:

  • 360 Degree Feedback
  • Customizable engagement surveys 
  • Performance reviews
  • Goal and OKR tracking

Culture Amp prices are available only on-demand.

Culture Amp alternatives we recommend Lattice, Officevibe.

Peakon - Employee engagement

There’s nothing more important in a company than employees’ dedication and motivation. Therefore, you need the proper tools to understand people’s engagement and take attitude when needed. Peakon is an online platform that helps you gather feedback and transform it into meaningful actions. You can see in real-time how each part of your organization completes its task, track issues, and increase performance with smart actions. Peakon gathers and analysis data but at the same time, it keeps everything safe. Employees are also part of Peakon experience because their opinions matter too.

Peakon’s prices are available only on-demand.

Culture Amp highlights:

  • Benchmarking
  • Question libraries
  • Automated survey scheduling and delivery
  • Leadership training

Alternatives worth checking: Leapsome, Vantage Circle

Monday - Workforce management

If you struggle with workforce management, monday.com is what you need. This online platform provides everything for team management, planning, tracking, and collaboration. It’s very easy to use and intuitive, offering hundreds of graphic templates to set up your best workspace. monday.com also integrates with almost any platform you might use from Google tools to LinkedIn and Facebook.

When your business is small you don’t have time for mistakes. Everything needs to be well-organized and automated. This platform includes automatic processes for repetitive tasks, visual representations for your data, and a customizable interface to suit your company.

Monday highlights:

  • plan timelines
  • track progress, 
  • see whos in charge of what, 
  • assign tasks to employees, 
  • get an overview of work.

monday.com costs from $8/month/user for a small team with basic processes to $16/month/user for the professional package.

Alternatives we recommend: Asana.

Toggl - Time tracking

When your business needs to a more accurate way to track employee time that is used on various tasks and projects, Toggl might be the right solution for you. It's easy to use, it's online, it has a free version that allows to check most of the platform functionalities, and what we've enjoyed the most is the fact that it works, and the reporting functionality is very powerful.

The team behind this online software highlights the following: plan, track, and deliver team projects without the last-minute rush. Visualize and balance your team's workloads so that no one is over or underworked.

Toggl highlights:

  • Track employee time,
  • Check client reports
  • Calculate profitability
  • Time audits
  • Billable rates

Toggl is ideal for small teams and prices start $9 per user per month.

There is one alternative we would like to mention: Harvest.

There are different types of HR software that employers use within small business: 

  1. Leave management systems
  2. Applicant tracking systems
  3. Payroll
  4. Employee engagement
  5. Workforce management
  6. Employee onboarding
  7. Performance management
  8. Employee training
  9. Time tracking/timesheet management

In the list above, we have tried to provide a perspective on some of the best tools for small businesses. Please remember that your industry might be different and not need all the tools. Select the best ones that fit your needs, try before you buy, and remember that a tool that has a huge amount of modules might not be the best for your side. 

In conclusion

HR software doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. Many of the available HR software can be used for free by businesses with few employees. Moreover, you can find HR software that runs in the browser and doesn’t require installation or maintenance, software that uses cloud storage space, and HR apps that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Technology manages regulations, calendars, schedules, time zones, payroll, attendance tracking, leave requests, performance analysis, and statistics. There’s no place for errors or misplaced files. When you have these amazing tools at hand you can take care of important tasks such as the company’s culture, employee satisfaction, and efficient planning.

Automate your Human Resources Management with the HR Software for Small Business that your employees will enjoy.

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