How to manage your staff when you have no HR department

In the vast majority of Spanish companies, nobody works on HR full time. According to the Central Business Register (DIRCE) published by Spain's national statistics office (INE), there were 3.31 million active companies in the country as of 1 January 2025, but more than half had no employees at all. Of the roughly 1.5 million that do employ someone, nearly 6 out of 10 have just one or two staff and barely 5% reach 20 workers. HR is handled by the owner between meetings, by whoever runs the office in spare moments, or simply by the external payroll bureau once a month.

Not having a department is not the problem. The problem is that legal obligations do not scale with company size: the time record required by article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute, the pay register, the holiday calendar and the duty to keep records apply in exactly the same way whether you employ three people or three hundred. This article explains how to get it under control without hiring anyone and without building a department.

Who actually runs HR in a small company

When there is no department, HR duties do not disappear: they get spread around. The external payroll bureau handles payslips, social security registrations and filings with the public employment service. Everything else —holidays, clock-ins, rotas, signed contracts, leave, incidents— lands on one person who does it on top of their actual job, usually with a spreadsheet and an email inbox.

That model works up to a very specific point: as long as you can keep it all in your head. Past eight or ten people, every shift swap, every remaining holiday day and every document waiting for a signature becomes a small decision you have to make without data. And when that person goes on holiday or leaves the company, the information leaves with them.

Obligations do not scale with company size

There is a widespread —and expensive— belief that employment law is something large companies worry about. It is not. Most obligations are triggered by the first employee you hire, and the Labour Inspectorate does not offer volume discounts. The clearest example is the working time record.

The company shall guarantee the daily record of working time, which must include the specific start and finish time of each worker's working day, without prejudice to any flexible working arrangements in place.

The same article requires you to keep the records for four years and to make them available to workers, their representatives and the Inspectorate. There is no headcount threshold: employing a single person is enough to be bound by it. And the new digital time-tracking regulation, still pending approval, will tighten it further by requiring remote, immediate access for inspectors.

Which obligations apply, by headcount

• From the first employee: daily working time record (art. 34.9), pay register showing average values broken down by sex and professional group (art. 28.2 and Royal Decree 902/2020), delivery of payslips (art. 29.1), the annual working calendar displayed at the workplace (art. 34.6) and an occupational risk prevention plan (Law 31/1995).
• From the first employee, too: registering the contract with the public employment service within 10 days of formalising it (art. 16.1 of the Statute) and an internal digital disconnection policy (art. 88 of Organic Law 3/2018).
• Up to 10 workers —or up to 25 with a single workplace—: the employer may personally take on prevention duties provided they normally work at the site and have the necessary competence (art. 30.5 of Law 31/1995).
• From 50 staff onwards: a negotiated and registered equality plan (Royal Decree 901/2020), planned LGBTI measures (Royal Decree 1026/2024) and the internal reporting channel under Law 2/2023.
• Whenever there is regular remote work: a written remote working agreement and an adapted time record (Law 10/2021).

If you are approaching the 50-employee threshold, plan ahead: the whistleblowing channel comes with confidentiality requirements and response deadlines that cannot be improvised. We cover it in detail in our article on Law 2/2023 and the whistleblowing channel.

Why spreadsheets and email stop being enough

The spreadsheet itself is not the issue: the issue is that it has no audit trail, notifies nobody and proves nothing in an inspection. These are the points where it always fails, and they have nothing to do with how well built it is.

The five failure points of running HR on spreadsheets and email

• It proves nothing: a spreadsheet can be edited after the fact without leaving a trace. A working time record must be reliable and tamper-evident, and an editable file rarely convinces an inspector.
• Holidays overlap: without a shared calendar, requests get approved on a first-come basis and nobody notices that half the shop floor has booked the same fortnight until it is too late.
• Documents go missing: contracts, addenda, payslips and acknowledgements scattered across inboxes, folders and drawers. The signed document you need is always the one you cannot find.
• Everything funnels through one person: every question about remaining days, every shift swap and every sick note is an interruption. That bottleneck is why staff admin feels like it takes twice as long as it should.
• There is no data to decide with: without an hours balance or absence history, you cannot tell who is building up overtime, who has holidays left or whether absenteeism is rising or falling.

The four processes to sort out first

You do not need to digitise everything at once. There is an order that works well, because it starts with what is legally required and with what eats up most of your week.

In this order

• 1. Time tracking: it is the only obligation on this list that an inspector can check in five minutes and fine on the same day. It must capture each person's start and finish time, every day, and be kept for four years.
• 2. Holidays and absences: a single calendar with each person's remaining days, their requests and the approvals. It removes half the questions arriving by email and prevents overlaps.
• 3. Documents and signatures: contracts, addenda, the disconnection policy, protocols and internal communications, with proof of delivery and signature. This is what saves you when a claim arrives.
• 4. Rotas and shifts: publishing the schedule in advance and notifying changes. In hospitality, retail or healthcare this is the process that creates the most daily friction and gains the most from being digitised.

The second item also carries a legal deadline that is broken constantly: holiday dates cannot be announced on the fly — the calendar has to be settled two months in advance.

The holiday calendar shall be set within each company. Workers shall know the dates corresponding to them at least two months before the start of their leave.

What getting it wrong actually costs

The honest comparison is not between «spending on software» and «spending nothing», but between the cost of sorting your admin out and the cost of not doing so. These are the current amounts under Spain's consolidated Law on Infringements and Penalties in the Social Order (LISOS).

The fines you are most likely to face

• Not keeping a working time record: serious offence, €751 to €7,500, applied per affected worker.
• Having no pay register or failing to provide it: serious offence, €751 to €7,500; if it results in pay discrimination, a very serious offence of €7,501 to €225,018.
• Not implementing a mandatory equality plan: serious offence, €751 to €7,500, rising to €225,018 where the plan stemmed from an agreement replacing a penalty.
• Not assessing occupational risks, psychosocial ones included: serious offence, €2,451 to €49,180.
• Having no internal reporting channel when one is required: very serious offence under Law 2/2023, with fines of up to €1,000,000 for legal entities.

Beyond the fine there is the invisible cost: surcharges and interest if the notice comes with a social security assessment, and the difficulty of defending an overtime claim in court when you have no records. You can estimate your own exposure with our penalty calculator.

The key: let employees manage themselves

This is the shift in thinking that saves the most time. When there is no HR department, the goal is not to make the admin faster: it is to take it off the person who is acting as the bottleneck. And you do that by giving the team autonomy.

If everyone clocks in from their phone, checks their remaining days without asking, books holidays in the app and signs documents in the same place, the volume of questions collapses. What is left for the manager is the part that genuinely needs judgement: approve or decline. Everything else —balance calculations, reminders, filing, the four-year retention— is handled by the system.

Where to start when staff admin falls to you alone: a 30-day plan

Trying to do it all at once is the surest way to abandon it in week two. A realistic sequence, in four steps of one week each:

One month to get it in order

• Week 1 · Take stock: how many people you employ, on what kind of working pattern, how many holiday days each has left and where the signed contracts actually are today. If you cannot answer those four questions in under ten minutes, you already know where the problem starts.
• Week 2 · Get time tracking running: add the team, spend five minutes explaining how to clock in and set the date from which paper and spreadsheets no longer count. This is the step that closes your most immediate legal exposure.
• Week 3 · Move holidays and absences across: load everyone's remaining days and open requests in the app. From then on the calendar is single and visible, and requests stop arriving by WhatsApp.
• Week 4 · Sort out the paperwork: upload current contracts and addenda, send whatever is pending for signature and set the routine for future hires.
• From month two: rotas and shifts published in advance, monthly working time and absence reports, and a review of the pay register.

How to manage your staff with Horalia

Horalia is built for exactly this situation: companies with no HR department, where staff admin is handled by someone who already has another job. Everything sits on one platform, employees use it from their phones and the initial setup takes an afternoon.

Everything it covers, without hiring anyone

• Clock in from a phone, a browser or a fixed terminal, with tamper-evident records, a full audit trail of any change and automatic retention for the 4 years required by article 34.9 of the Statute.
• Self-service holidays and absences: each person sees their own balance and books days in the app; you only approve or decline, and the team calendar flags overlaps.
• Working schedules and shift rotas published in advance with automatic change notifications, plus a real-time hours balance to spot overtime and shortfalls.
• Document management with electronic signature: contracts, addenda, policies and communications signed remotely, with proof of delivery and centralised filing.
• Built-in whistleblowing channel, ready for when you cross the 50-employee threshold or if you decide to set one up voluntarily beforehand.
• Exportable working time, overtime and absence reports, so the documentation is ready before anyone asks for it rather than afterwards.

If what you have ahead of you is a hire, our article on how to recruit with ATS software may help too. You can try Horalia for free and have your time records running today.