From spreadsheets to an HR system: a one-afternoon migration guide

Running HR in Excel or Google Sheets at 5–10 people is not a mistake; it's the correct amount of process for that size. Roughly half of small IT companies run exactly this way. The problems arrive with growth, and they arrive on a schedule:

• Vacation balances drift. Two people edit the sheet, a formula breaks silently, and by December nobody can say who has how many days left — so it gets renegotiated person by person.
• Everyone can see everything.One shared sheet means salaries, addresses and sick-leave history are one mis-shared link away from the whole company. GDPR aside, it's a trust problem.
• The sheet has one owner.When the office manager who “knows how it works” is on leave, HR is on leave.
• No history. Who approved that time off? When did the salary change and why? A spreadsheet overwrites; an HR system remembers.

The usual tipping point is 10–20 people, a first HR hire, or a client/investor due-diligence that asks uncomfortable questions about how personal data is stored.

Don't try to move everything. Day one needs exactly three things:

1. People. Names, emails, roles, departments, managers, start dates. This is one CSV export from your current sheet.
2. Time-off balances.The current year's entitlement and what's been used — the single most error-prone number in spreadsheet HR, and the first thing employees will check in the new system.
3. The org structure. Who reports to whom — it drives approvals, so it must be right before the first vacation request flows through.

Everything else — documents, reviews history, onboarding templates, custom fields — migrates incrementally over the following weeks. Waiting until “all the data is ready” is how migrations die.

1. Clean the sheet (45 min). One row per person; split name/email/department into their own columns; pick one date format and stick to it; delete ex-employees into a separate archive tab.
2. Import people via CSV (15 min). A decent system maps your columns to its fields at import time — you should not have to rename columns to match a template. Spot-check 3–5 people against the sheet.
3. Set managers + org chart (30 min).Assign each person's manager; the org chart should draw itself from that data.
4. Configure time-off policies + starting balances (45 min).Vacation/sick/parental quotas, your working week, public holidays — then enter each person's remaining days as the opening balance.
5. Invite the team (15 min). Start with managers and whoever approves leave; roll out to everyone once the first request round-trips correctly.
6. Retire the sheet (5 min, the hard part). Mark it read-only with a link to the new system. Two sources of truth is worse than either alone.

• Vacation requests get requested, approved and deducted in one place — with the calendar and balances agreeing by construction.
• Personal data stops being all-company-readable: roles decide who sees what, and access to sensitive fields is logged.
• Payroll input stops being an argument — the month's leave and comp changes export cleanly for your accountant.
• New joiners get a checklist instead of a Slack thread, and their record exists before their first day.

Helia HR is built for exactly this migration — the anchor promise is “from spreadsheets to professional HR ops in one afternoon”:

• CSV import with column remapping — paste or upload straight from Excel/Sheets, map your columns to fields on screen, tolerant of real-world date formats.
• Time off with balances, calendar and an .ics feed, approval rules that follow your org chart, and public-holiday awareness.
• Org chart drawn from manager links, a searchable directory with custom fields, and role-gated PII with an audit log — sensitive fields are HR-only and every access is logged.
• Payroll-input export for your accountant, and sample data you can load to explore before importing anything real.
• Modular pricing: start with the HR base, add capacity planning and client invoicing only if you sell people's time — pay for what you use.