With fewer than 100 people on payroll, it is easy to fall into one of two traps: sticking with spreadsheets «because we're small», or buying a system built for a multinational, loaded with modules nobody will touch for years. Neither gets it right.
Below 100 employees, HR is usually one or two people doing everything. What they need is not more features — it is for the essential ones to stop eating their time, and for the advanced stuff to be there when it is needed, not before.
What's essential from day one
Time tracking and time-off management are not optional based on company size — in Spain, the obligation to record working hours applies whether you have 5 people or 5,000. Add to that an employee record with data protected by permission level, and, where the activity requires it, occupational health and safety tracking (training, protective equipment, health surveillance). These three areas — People, Time, Time Off — are the baseline Cantevia includes in every plan, precisely because they are the part no company can skip. This has nothing to do with company revenue: the obligation to track working hours is the same for an 8-person company as for a 95-person one.
What can usually wait
An anonymous pulse-survey dashboard, a recruiting funnel with AI résumé screening, or a six-block executive analytics panel all add real value, but they are not urgent for a 20-person company where you can feel the mood in the room and hiring happens a few times a year. Turning them on too early is not a serious mistake, but it is a setup and learning cost that does not pay off yet. Cantevia organizes these modules (Climate, Talent, Analytics) so they can be switched on by plan, without forcing anyone to pay for or configure something they will not use yet.
What's worth getting right from the start
Manually entering an entire workforce, department by department, is the most tedious part of starting on any new system. A master-data importer with an Excel template — loading employees, departments and job roles in one go — saves days of admin work at exactly the moment there is least appetite for spending time on setup.
Growing without switching systems
What usually happens in a company that starts small is that, over time, it needs to turn on Climate to measure team mood, Talent once hiring picks up, or Analytics once leadership asks for consolidated numbers. If those modules already exist inside the same system and just need switching on, growth doesn't force a vendor migration or re-loading workforce data from scratch.
For under 100 employees, the question is not how many modules a system has, but whether the three essential ones work well, and whether the rest can wait without being penalized for it.