Your Company Has 20 Employees and HR Lives in a Spreadsheet. Here's the Fix.
You started tracking PTO in a Google Sheet. Now you have 20 people and it's chaos. Here's exactly when and how to move to a real HR platform — without the enterprise price tag.
Every company hits the same wall.
At 5 employees, a Google Sheet works fine. You track PTO in one tab, employee info in another, and onboarding is an email with links.
At 10 employees, the Sheet gets messy. Someone's PTO balance is wrong. A new hire didn't get all their documents. You forgot to update someone's emergency contact.
At 20 employees, it's chaos. You're spending hours every week on things that should be automatic. Leave requests come through Slack, email, and text. Nobody knows how much PTO they have left. The "employee handbook" is a Google Doc that nobody's read.
This is when most companies start looking at HR software. And immediately get scared by the prices.
Workday? That's for Fortune 500 companies with $150K implementation budgets. BambooHR? Decent, but no AI, no automation, and their prices keep climbing. Rippling? Powerful, but complex and expensive for a 20-person team.
Here's what you actually need at 20 employees:
- A place to store employee records
- Leave management that tracks balances automatically
- Time tracking if you bill clients
- Document management for handbooks, NDAs, and offer letters
- Onboarding checklists so new hires don't fall through the cracks
That's it. You don't need a $50/employee enterprise suite. You need the basics done well, with room to grow.
That's exactly what we built Lenavio for. Start at $12/employee. Set up in an afternoon. Add AI agents and advanced features when you need them.
Your HR shouldn't live in a spreadsheet. But it shouldn't cost you a fortune to fix that either.