After looking at many different angles on choosing, rolling out and getting real value from HR software, the most useful thing to bring into a demo is not an opinion, it is a list of concrete questions. Generic ones — «is it easy to use?», «is support good?» — get a yes from every vendor. The ones that matter are the ones that can only be answered by looking at how the product is actually built underneath.

This list is not meant to be exhaustive — every company has its own priorities — but it covers the points where the gap between a well-designed system and one that only looks complete in a slide deck tends to show up.

On time tracking and audit trails

  • Can an administrator delete a clock-in with no trace, or can they only void it while recording who did it and why?
  • Can the attendance history be exported in a readable format for Spain's labor inspectorate, if the company operates there?
  • How is the overtime hourly rate calculated: a fixed formula (annual gross salary divided by agreed working hours), or typed in by hand each time?

On payroll and sensitive data

  • Does the system distinguish company directors' tax treatment (a fixed rate, under Spanish rules) from regular employees (progressive), or does it treat them the same?
  • Can an employee's personal data and emergency contact be seen by their manager, or only by the employee themselves and HR?
  • What happens when you need to compare the payslip your payroll provider sends against what you expected to pay?

On climate surveys and sensitive data

  • Is a pulse survey's anonymity a company promise, or a technical impossibility for the system to know who answered what?
  • Can you configure a short, frequent pulse, or only an annual macro-survey?

On recruiting, e-signature and structure

  • Are candidate records anonymized once someone does not move forward, or kept indefinitely?
  • When a document is signed electronically, is there an independently verifiable timestamp, or just an internal record kept by the vendor?
  • If there is more than one company, such as a group, is each one's data and file storage genuinely isolated, or do they share a database underneath?
  • Can permissions be set per module, level (read, write, admin) and scope (own, team, company-wide), or are there only generic roles like admin/editor?
  • Do all modules need to go live on day one, or can you start with the essentials and add the rest once the company is ready?

Why this list and not another

Every question on this list comes from a real problem already covered elsewhere in this series: clock-ins that can be deleted without a trace, income tax miscalculated after a role change, anonymity that's a promise rather than a design choice, training that never gets finished. Asking these in a demo isn't distrust of the vendor — it's asking to see the product solve the same problem the company already has today.

None of these questions gets answered well by a brochure. Ask to see the actual screen, not a slide: it is the only way to know whether the product is built to hold up day to day, or just to survive the demo.