When a small business starts shopping for HR software, it's easy to end up comparing platforms built for 200-person HR departments with a specialist for every module. The result is paying for features nobody will ever open, while the two things that are actually required by law still live in a spreadsheet.

A small business operating in Spain doesn't need "everything HR software can possibly do." It needs to cover what the law requires from employee number one, without taking on complexity it doesn't need yet.

The two legal minimums that aren't optional

Time tracking has been mandatory for every company in Spain since 2019, regardless of size (Article 34.9 of Spain's Workers' Statute). It isn't an "advanced" feature — it's the baseline. Alongside it, occupational health and safety — training, protective equipment, and health surveillance under Article 22 of Spain's Occupational Risk Prevention Law — applies from the first hire too, not just once headcount crosses some threshold.

If HR software doesn't handle these two things solidly, everything else on the feature list is decoration. Before you look at recruiting, performance or engagement surveys, check that time-tracking corrections leave a trace of who changed what and why, and that training and protective-equipment records exist per employee, not in a shared folder someone updates manually.

Activate by module, not by catalog size

Cantevia, for example, splits its product into modules — People, Time and Leave included in every plan; Climate, Talent and Analytics depending on the plan — precisely because a 15-person company doesn't start from the same place as a 150-person one. Starting with the basics isn't settling for less. It's not paying for, or maintaining, features nobody will use.

What's worth checking even if you're small

  • Whether time-tracking records would hold up under a labor inspection, not just whether they technically "exist."
  • Whether onboarding your first employees requires entering every field one by one, or can be done in bulk.
  • Whether permissions distinguish between what a founder sees and what a part-time HR hire sees.

There's another point small businesses tend to overlook: who's actually going to keep the system running day to day. In a small company, HR might be one person handling it alongside other responsibilities, not a full department. Software built with small businesses in mind should let that person add employees, configure absence types, or adjust permissions without depending on external technical support or opening a ticket every time something small needs to change. That includes things as simple as adding a new department, renaming an absence type, or adding a question to the climate question bank — configuration tasks, not programming ones. If every small tweak requires a developer, the system will always lag behind how the business actually changes month to month.

A small business doesn't need the most complete platform on the market. It needs one that closes its legal obligations without gaps and lets it grow module by module when it actually needs to — not before. That's a more useful goal than chasing every feature a bigger competitor happens to have.