Guide
HR admin without an HR department
Leave, new starters, documents and payroll inputs: the HR admin every company has, who usually ends up doing it, and how to keep it moving without hiring a team for it.
Key takeaways
- HR admin is mostly routine: requests, records, documents and deadlines, checked against rules you already have.
- Without an HR department it lands on a founder, an office manager or whoever answered last time.
- Write the policy down once, keep one record per person, and set dates that warn you before things expire.
- Hand off the routine and keep the judgement: pay, performance and anything personal stay with people.
The HR work every company has
Most companies under a hundred people don't have an HR department. They still have HR admin. Someone answers leave requests, keeps the holiday calendar right, sends the contract to a new starter, orders their laptop, checks that a work permit hasn't expired and gathers the hours and changes payroll needs before the cutoff.
None of it is hard. All of it is constant, and each request is small enough that nobody thinks of it as a job. That's why it piles up: it arrives in chat, by email and in the corridor, at every hour, and it waits until someone has a spare moment.
- Time off: requests, balances, clashes and the team calendar
- New starters: contract, accounts, equipment, first-day plan
- Leavers: final pay inputs, returning equipment, closing access
- Records: one up-to-date file per person, with documents and their expiry dates
- Payroll inputs: hours, overtime, absences and changes, ready before the cutoff
- Questions: "How many days do I have left?", "Can I work from abroad?", "Where's my payslip?"
Who ends up doing it
In practice it's a founder, an operations lead, an office manager or the finance person, on top of their real job. The cost doesn't show up on a payslip. It shows up as interruptions, as answers that depend on who you ask, and as the thing that slipped: the leave that was approved twice for the same week, the new starter with no laptop on day one, the visa nobody noticed was expiring.
The fix isn't to hire an HR team before you need one. It's to make the routine work predictable, so it can be done the same way every time by whoever, or whatever, is doing it.
Write the policy down once
Most HR rules already exist; they live in someone's head. Put them on one page: how many days of leave, how far ahead people must ask, how many people can be off from one team at once, who approves what, what counts as sick leave and what paperwork it needs, and when payroll closes each month.
A short written policy does two things. People can answer their own questions, and every request can be checked against the same rules. That second part is what makes the work easy to hand off.
Keep one record per person
Spreadsheets in three places and documents in someone's inbox are where HR admin goes wrong. Pick one place, your HR system or a single shared sheet, and keep one record per person: start date, role, manager, leave balance, documents and the date each one expires.
Then set reminders that fire well before the deadline, not on it. Thirty days' notice on a work permit or a probation review is useful. Notice on the day isn't.
Turn starters and leavers into checklists
A new starter touches every system you have. A checklist, started the day the offer is signed, turns that into a list of small tasks with owners and dates: contract out and back, accounts created, equipment ordered, desk and first-week plan ready. If the start date moves, every task moves with it.
Leavers run the same list in reverse. The step most often missed is closing access, which is also the one that matters most.
What to hand off, and what to keep
Hand off the routine: requests checked against the policy, calendars and balances kept current, checklists started and followed through, documents tracked, payroll inputs gathered and checked before the cutoff. This is the work the HR Admin at OFFHOURS does, inside the HR system, calendar and chat you already use.
Keep the judgement. Pay decisions, performance, disciplinary matters, health and anything personal stay with people. A good set-up doesn't just allow that: it sends those cases to the right person on its own, with what they need to decide.
- A leave request inside the rules is approved, and the calendar and balance are updated
- A request that clashes with two others in the same team goes to the manager, with the clash shown
- A sick note is filed against the right person and the right dates
- A work permit due in 30 days is flagged to the manager, not discovered after it lapses
- Payroll inputs are checked against the month's leave and changes before they go to whoever runs payroll
How to start
Start with the request that arrives most often. For most companies that's time off. Write the leave policy down, move balances into one place and decide who approves what. Once that runs on its own, add new starters, then documents, then payroll inputs.
If you'd rather not build it yourself, the HR Admin can take it on. It's working within a week, on probation at first while you review everything it does, then supervised around the clock by our engineers. Every action is logged and can be undone. Anyone in the company can send it a request without needing access; only the people who manage the work need it.
