Comment by BrandoElFollito 2 days ago
Beside the lack of attention, you also have gargantuan legal requirements you need to integrate. Which change all the time. Sometimes a few per country.
This is for everything: pay, vacation, etc.
It is really complicated.
> has their own set of rules so most HR software doesn't bother calculating it -- you just figure it out manually and input it every year for every employee
Beg to disagree. This is the complexity that large ERP firms handle and why Oracle, SalesForce, etc are expensive to implement. They figure out the commonality (if any) and build for it. Then they add on features specific to countries they target and then they add the ability to configure for your own situation (to a certain level).
PeopleSoft did this for Payroll and workforce administration which is part of how they cornered the market for HCM.
The problem when building it yourself is that this is usually done by "generic" developers who discover edge cases (often together with the requester) that threaten the whole model.
A company doing payroll for us ("us" being a multinational company) asked for a "typical payroll" to start with. Fortunately we had experienced people on the pay side who discarded the company because of this question (for one they should know, and for two they should know that "typical" will cover maybe 60% of the cases -- I thought that this was an exaggeration until I discovered the reality of calculating pay in France)
A good company specializing in "pay" or "vacation" (which are very regulated over here) will know the "typical" case and the edge cases.
One advantage of building in house is that you're only building for your own company. This is significantly less work than building commercial software for multiple clients (which I have also done). I can't overstate how much less work this is and how much of a better experience it can be for users.
As an example, for calculating annual vacation entitlement, we have some pretty complicated rules. But every company in every country has their own set of rules so most HR software doesn't bother calculating it -- you just figure it out manually and input it every year for every employee. But because we just have one "client" our rules are just code that we can change as needed and can arbitrarily use whatever information we have. This saves HR a ton of manual work all the time. But this only works because it only needs to be one set of hard-coded rules.