How many spreadsheets does your HR actually run on?
At most SMEs, "HR in Excel" is a collection of spreadsheets. Count along:
- Employee list with contract details, start dates and end dates
- Leave overview with balances per employee
- Schedule of who works when, works from home or is absent
- Asset list: which laptop, phone or badge is with whom
- Fleet list: company cars, fuel cards, lease contracts and who drives which car
- Contract overview with type, probation period and end date per employee
- Expense template that every employee fills in and sends on
- Review template per employee, with scores and agreements
- Survey results that someone exports and gathers in one tab
- Checklists: an onboarding checklist for every new hire, an offboarding checklist for every leaver, plus a list of yearly and recurring tasks
Each file works on its own. The problem sits between the files. A new hire touches almost all of those lists. So does someone who leaves. And nobody keeps them in sync automatically.
In our conversations with Belgian SMEs of 50 to 150 employees, we hear it again and again: a large part of these processes still runs on spreadsheets.
HR administration in Excel means: keeping all HR data and processes in separate spreadsheets that someone has to keep in sync by hand, with each other and with the payroll provider.
Key takeaway: HR in Excel is rarely one file. It's ten, and you are the connection between them.
What does HR in Excel really cost?
The licence is free. The real cost sits in three things you never see on an invoice.
1. Time lost to retyping and follow-up. A new hire in Excel means: updating the employee list, copying a contract from a template, having the Dimona filed, noting down a laptop and badge, possibly assigning a car, adjusting the schedule, informing the payroll provider and telling the manager what needs to happen. Every step is a place where something gets forgotten.
From practice: at a Peepel customer with more than 100 employees, the admin around one new hire dropped from 8 hours to 30 minutes. Peepel collects the details directly from the new employee, brings everything together in one file and prepares the contract, tasks and equipment for the people who need to act on them.
2. Errors you don't see. Spreadsheets almost always contain errors. Researcher Raymond Panko compiled audits of real-world spreadsheets: the most thorough studies found errors in at least 86% of the files examined (Panko, 2000). This is a known human error rate in repetitive work, and it happens to careful people too. In HR, one wrong cell means a wrong leave balance, a laptop left with a former employee or an expense claim reimbursed twice.
3. Risk of missed obligations. In Belgium, every new hire must be declared to the NSSO (RSZ) via Dimona, at the latest when the employee starts. A missed declaration leads to a sanction under the Social Criminal Code, multiplied by the number of employees involved, and the NSSO can impose a solidarity contribution of at least €3,464.01 (2024 amount) (Securex Lex4You). The same goes for expiring contracts, probation periods and lease contracts: when they sit in a column, follow-up depends on someone remembering.
Key takeaway: The cost of HR in Excel sits in hours of retyping, in errors and in missed deadlines. All three grow with every employee, every car and every process you add.
8 signs your company has outgrown Excel
If you recognise three or more, Excel already costs you more than HR software today.
- You have more than 50 employees. Every month brings new hires and leavers, contract changes, leave requests and expense claims. The volume becomes too large to track flawlessly by hand.
- A hire or departure touches five or more files. Employee list, contract, assets, fleet, schedule, access. When someone leaves, everything has to be undone in reverse order.
- You're not sure which laptop, phone or car is with whom. Asset and fleet lists are the first to fall behind, because nobody updates them when something changes.
- Leave and scheduling are two separate lists. Anyone who wants to know who works next week has to put the leave file and the schedule side by side.
- Performance reviews live in a separate spreadsheet per employee or per manager. You have no overview of who had their review, which goals were agreed and how someone progresses over the years.
- Onboarding and other routines run on a checklist in Excel. Only the person who keeps the file knows who has to do what and what's already done. The same goes for expense templates that someone has to merge and check.
- You can't answer a simple question about your people within five minutes. How many people left last year? Which contracts expire this quarter? How did the latest satisfaction survey score per team?
- Everyone with access to the drive sees everything. A spreadsheet has no permissions per employee or manager and doesn't track who changed what. For sensitive personal data under the GDPR, that's a weak spot.
Key takeaway: The strongest sign is the moment one event, such as a new hire, forces you to update several files by hand.
Excel vs HR software: the difference per area
| Area | In Excel | In Peepel |
|---|---|---|
| Employee file | Spread across tabs and copies | One central file per employee |
| Leave | Balances updated by hand in a leave overview | Request, approval and balance in one flow |
| Who works when | Separate schedule, apart from leave | Calendar module with schedule, remote work and leave in one view |
| Contracts | Contract overview in Excel, every contract drafted by hand | Templates filled in automatically with data from the employee file |
| Assets | A list that falls behind | Assigned to the employee, reclaimed on departure |
| Fleet | Separate list of cars, cards and leases | Linked to the employee and their file |
| Expenses | Excel template per employee, merged by hand | Submit, approve and forward in the app |
| Performance reviews | Templates in folders per manager | Shared templates, history per employee |
| Surveys | Loose forms, results in a spreadsheet | Surveys on your people data, results per team |
| Tasks, checklists and routines | Excel to-dos and reminders in someone's calendar | Onboarding, offboarding and recurring checklists with tasks that go to the right person automatically |
| Payroll provider | Sent and retyped by hand | Input via the connection with your payroll provider |
| Permissions and history | Whoever has the drive sees everything | Permissions per role and a full audit trail |
| Cost | Free licence, paid in hours | €9.50 per employee per month, all modules |
What changes when everything is in one place and connected?
A central HR platform is one place where all employee data and processes come together, and where a change automatically flows through to everything that depends on it.
You see the difference best in the moments that take the most work today:
A new employee starts. Peepel collects the details directly from the new employee, so HR no longer has to retype them. The contract is filled in from a template, Dimona is part of the flow, a laptop and possibly a car are assigned, the person appears in the calendar and the onboarding checklist spreads the tasks across HR, IT and the manager, with deadlines and reminders.
Someone requests leave. The manager approves in the app, the balance updates and the calendar module immediately shows who's away. The payroll provider gets the right input.
It's time for reviews. Every manager works with the same template, the review lands in the employee's file, and you see at a glance which reviews are still open. You link a survey to the same teams, so you can put results next to turnover and absence.
Someone leaves. The offboarding shows which laptop, phone, badge and car need to come back, which access needs to be closed and what goes to the payroll provider.
Key takeaway: Centralising solves the searching. The real gain comes from all modules being connected: one event triggers the right actions in leave, calendar, contracts, assets, fleet and payroll.
Connecting your HR data to AI via MCP
This is the part that's impossible in Excel.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT connect securely to the software you use. Anthropic introduced it in November 2024; OpenAI and Google DeepMind adopted it in 2025, and since December 2025 it has been governed by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation (Wikipedia).
Peepel has an MCP connection. That means you can ask your AI assistant questions about all your HR data directly and build automations with it, within the permissions you have in Peepel. A few examples:
- "Which contracts, probation periods and lease contracts expire in the next three months?"
- "Which laptops and cars are still assigned to people who have left?"
- "Which performance reviews are still open, per manager?"
- "Put the results of the latest survey next to turnover per team."
- "Which expense claims have been waiting for approval for more than a week?"
- "Which tasks from the onboarding checklists are past their deadline, and who has them?"
- A weekly overview for every manager with open leave requests, reviews and onboarding tasks.
That brings two things into focus that stay buried in Excel: the trends (how your headcount moves, where turnover or absence rises, how people develop after their reviews) and the follow-up (who still has to do what, and what expires soon). Asking a question replaces building a pivot table.
Key takeaway: In Excel you manage data. With Peepel and MCP you ask that data questions and let recurring follow-up run automatically.
How Peepel approaches it
You can divide HR software into four levels:
| Level | Name | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manual | HR in Excel, email and folders. |
| 2 | System of Record | All data central, but you still carry out every task yourself. |
| 3 | System of Workflow | Approvals and routing are automated, the work itself you still do. |
| 4 | System of Execution (agentic HR) | The platform carries out the task and asks for approval where your policy requires it. |
An SME coming from Excel is at level 1. Peepel takes you to level 4 in one step. HR software got stuck at organising work. Agentic HR does it.
Switching from Excel to HR software: how does it work?
Switching goes faster than most SMEs expect. At Peepel, a standard onboarding takes about two weeks:
- Import data. Your existing spreadsheets for employees, leave, assets and fleet become the foundation. Everything already in them comes along.
- Set up templates. Your existing contract and review templates are set up in Peepel, so they fill in automatically.
- Connect your payroll provider. From then on, payroll input runs through the connection.
- Training for HR and managers. Employees get access to their own data, requests and expenses.
Read more in our guide to HR system migration.
What level is your HR at?
Answer each question with yes or no. Your first "yes" is your level.
- Is your employee data, leave, assets and reviews mostly in Excel, email and folders? Level 1
- Is everything central, but do you still carry out every task yourself? Level 2
- Do approvals run automatically, but do you still click through every step? Level 3
- Do you give an instruction and the work gets done, with approval where needed? Level 4
Ready to leave your spreadsheets behind?
See in a short demo how you bring leave, scheduling, contracts, assets, fleet, expenses, reviews and checklists from separate spreadsheets into one connected platform, including the connection with your payroll provider and AI via MCP.
Further reading:
- Digitising HR processes: where do you start?
- Automate employee onboarding
- Automate employee offboarding
- Automating the Dimona declaration
- Best HRIS software in Belgium (2026)
Sources
- Panko, R. R., "Spreadsheet Errors: What We Know. What We Think We Can Do" (2000). https://arxiv.org/abs/0802.3457
- Securex Lex4You, "Sancties en gevolgen voor de RSZ-bijdragen bij gebrek aan aangifte". https://www.securex.be/nl/lex4you/werkgever/themas/verplichtingen-werkgever/dimona-aangifte/sancties-en-gevolgen-voor-de-rsz-bijdragen-bij-gebrek-aan-aangifte
- Securex Lex4You, "Dimona - sociale inspectie en federaal sociaal strafrecht". https://www.securex.be/nl/lex4you/werkgever/themas/sociale-inspectie-en-sancties/sociale-inspectie-en-federaal-sociaal-strafrecht/dimona
- Wikipedia, "Model Context Protocol". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol
