From spreadsheets to an HR system: a 30-day plan for Saudi companies
A practical four-week plan for moving a growing Saudi company from spreadsheets and WhatsApp to a proper HR system, without disrupting payroll.
Moving to an HR system takes about four weeks for most Saudi companies of fifty to a few hundred employees: clean and import the employee record in week one, move leave and letters in week two, set policies and approval chains in week three, and run payroll in parallel in week four until two months match.
Most companies we talk to run HR on a combination of spreadsheets, a shared drive and WhatsApp until something forces a change: a payroll mistake, an expired iqama found too late, or simply too many people to track by hand. Moving to an HR system does not need to be a long project. Here is a four-week plan that works for most companies with between fifty and a few hundred employees.
Week 1: get the employee record right
Everything else depends on a clean employee record, so start there.
- Export your current employee list to one spreadsheet: name in Arabic and English, national ID or iqama number, nationality, job title, department, manager, start date and contract type.
- Add the documents that expire: iqama, passport, work permit, professional licences, with their expiry dates.
- Agree the org structure: departments, positions and who reports to whom.
- Import it, and fix every error the import reports before moving on.
Done when every employee exists once, with a manager, and every expiry date is in the system.
Week 2: leave, letters and self-service
These are the requests employees make most often, and moving them out of WhatsApp is the quickest win.
- Set up leave types and opening balances. Check them against your work regulation and the Labour Law.
- Load your public holidays and working week, including Ramadan hours.
- Prepare letter templates in Arabic and English: salary certificate, experience letter, and any others you issue regularly.
- Invite employees and managers to self-service, and tell them that requests now go through the system.
Done when leave requests and letters are requested, approved and issued in the system.
Week 3: policies and approvals
- Upload your approved work regulation and key policies, and ask employees to acknowledge them.
- Define approval chains: who approves leave, letters, travel and other requests, and what happens when someone is away.
- Decide which notifications people receive, and how often.
Done when the common requests follow a defined approval chain and nobody approves by message.
Week 4: payroll in parallel
Do not switch payroll on the first day. Run it in parallel.
- Load salary structures: basic, housing, transport and other allowances, effective from the right dates.
- Load loans and advances with their remaining balances.
- Run the month's payroll in the new system alongside your current process, and compare every employee line by line.
- Investigate every difference until you can explain it. Most differences come from data, not from the calculation.
Done when two consecutive months match, or every difference is explained. Only then make the new system your payroll of record.
A few things that save time
- Name an owner. One person in HR owns the rollout and makes the decisions.
- Clean the data once. Fixing data in the spreadsheet before import is much faster than fixing it afterwards.
- Keep government records aligned. If the import reveals a salary or job title that differs from your contracts or GOSI registration, correct the source as well, not only the new system. See our guides to GOSI and WPS and Mudad.
RafiqHR's import templates, dry runs and parallel payroll runs are built around this plan. You can start a trial and follow it on your own data.
