HR software for IT outsourcing companies: what actually matters

A product company's HR tool manages people. An outsourcing company's HR tool manages people whose time is the product. That one difference changes the requirements list:

• An employee isn't just a directory row — they have an allocation (which projects, what percentage, until when) and a billable status.
• Vacation isn't just a balance — it's capacity your client loses that week, and it must be visible in the delivery plan, not only in the HR calendar.
• The month ends with client invoices built from logged time — if HR, timesheets and billing live in three disconnected tools, someone reconciles them by hand. Every month.

• A generic HR system(directory, time off, reviews). Fine at HR, blind to projects — it doesn't know who is on the bench or that Friday's approved leave just broke a client commitment.
• A spreadsheet for capacity, owned by one delivery manager, updated when there's time. Works until it doesn't — usually mid-quarter, silently.
• Invoicing in accounting software, reconstructed monthly from memory and Slack. The leak point for billable hours.

The alternative most teams evaluate next is a full PSA suite (professional services automation). PSAs do projects, resourcing and billing well — but they typically price the resourcing/billing features into $25–50 per user per month tiers, assume a dedicated ops role to run them, and still leave you needing an HR system for time off, onboarding, reviews and personal data.

• HR base: directory with custom fields, org chart, time off with balances and an approvals chain that follows your management structure, role-gated access to personal data with an audit trail.
• Capacity: a people × weeks matrix with allocation percentages, billable flags on people and projects, a bench view, and a rolling forecast — with approved leave automatically reflected.
• Money:timesheets tied to assignments, per-project billing models (T&M / retainer / fixed), one-step monthly invoice generation, receivables, and per-project margins.
• Adoption reality: engineers will touch this tool weekly — it has to be fast, keyboard-friendly and unbloated, or timesheets die and everything downstream dies with them.
• Pricing that fits 5–200 people:transparent, per-employee, no “contact sales” wall, and ideally modular — a 12-person shop shouldn't pay for modules it doesn't use.

Honest boundary: if you run hundreds of concurrent projects, need Gantt-level project scheduling, complex revenue recognition (POC accounting), or deep Jira/ERP two-way sync as a hard requirement — you are in classic PSA territory, and the $30–50/user price of a Kantata, Scoro or Productive is the cost of that depth. Most 5–200-person outsourcing companies never hit that bar: they need the delivery-ops layer (capacity, timesheets, invoicing, margins) next to their HR system, not a second ERP.

Helia HR is built specifically for this segment — an HR system with the delivery layer included, instead of a PSA with HR bolted on:

• The HR base: directory + custom fields, org chart, time off with balances/calendar/.ics, onboarding and offboarding checklists, reviews, 1-on-1s, career ladders — all modular, enable only what you use.
• The Delivery layer: capacity matrix with bench and a 12-week forecast, timesheets, client invoicing with VAT and receivables, per-project profitability — driven by the same people records, so leave and roll-offs show up in the plan automatically.
• Engineer-friendly UX: fast, dark-mode default, command palette, keyboard-first — built so the weekly timesheet takes a minute, not a sigh.
• Transparent modular pricing with a low monthly minimum — see the pricing page for exact numbers; no sales call required.