HELITS HRIS: what two years of building our own HR software taught us

Anyone who develops HR software from scratch underestimates one thing at the start, almost without fail: how much complexity is hidden in what companies "just do." HELITS HRIS — our internal development project that now runs as a finished product — has taught us this on many levels over the past two years.

This article is not a marketing text for our product. It is an honest report on what actually happens in the development of an in-house HR platform — the decisions, the complications, and why we are nevertheless convinced the path was right.

Why we built HRIS at all

The decision to develop our own HR software instead of reselling an existing solution was not taken lightly. We had previously supported and configured SAP SuccessFactors, Personio, Factorial and several smaller solutions for customers. The pattern we kept seeing: companies adapt to the software, not the other way around.

A metalworking operation in the Chiemgau, 55 employees, shift work — that requires different leave planning than an agency in Munich. A trading company with field staff needs different onboarding flows than a service provider with purely on-site teams. Personio cannot model that. SAP is too heavy and too expensive.

HELITS HRIS was meant to be modular — not as a sales argument, but technically: every module runs independently, can be activated or deactivated, and shares only a common data foundation. That was the plan.

The biggest underestimation: permissions logic

When you develop HR software, you first think about features: leave requests, recruiting, documents. What actually consumes the most development time is permissions logic.

Who is allowed to see what? Not in the abstract, but concretely: may the team lead see the leave requests of her direct reports but not those of the other department? May the HR administrator view salary data, but not the direct supervisor? What happens when someone is in two teams at the same time? What if an employee is also internally a supervisor?

These combinations are not academic — they occur in every real company. We have rebuilt the permissions architecture of HELITS HRIS twice. The first design was too rigid (every exception became a special case), the second too flexible (too many configuration options that produced errors). The third version — a role-based hierarchy with inheritable exception rules — has been running stably for eight months.

The Microsoft 365 integration: opportunity and complexity source at once

HELITS HRIS is deeply integrated into Microsoft 365 — single sign-on via Azure AD, notifications via Teams channels, document storage via SharePoint. From the customer's perspective that is a real benefit: no new ecosystem, no further login.

But: the Microsoft Graph API is reliable — and changes anyway. In one case, a breaking change in the Graph API version caused our Teams notifications to fail for 72 hours. Not because we had made a mistake, but because an endpoint behaviour that was marked stable in the documentation had changed.

We have since built monitoring that watches Graph API responses for structural changes — not just for HTTP error codes. That sounds detail-oriented. It is detail-oriented. It is also necessary if you want to call an integration production-ready.

The recruiting module: where HRIS really differentiates

The module on which we have spent the most time is also the one that most convinces: recruiting. One-click multiposting to several job boards simultaneously — including jobportal.bayern, which now runs as an independent platform — combined with an AI-supported matching score that evaluates application documents in a structured way.

The matching is not a replacement for human decisions. It is a filter: who even comes into the shortlist? At one customer with 200 applications for a position, this reduced the first review from three hours to 40 minutes. That is the difference that counts in practice.

The opportunities we now see

Two years of development have made one thing clear to us: the HR software market is not saturated — it is mis-served. There are either very expensive and very complex (SAP, Workday) or very cheap and very generic (many SaaS solutions). What is missing is robust mid-market software that is industry-configurable and still works as a coherent whole.

HELITS HRIS can become that. Not for everyone — but for mid-sized companies in Bavaria and the DACH region with 30 to 500 employees that use Microsoft 365 and are looking for an HR solution that adapts to them, not the other way around.

The next development steps: an extended training module for mandatory instructions, a deeper integration with the digital personnel file according to German retention periods, and — the project that occupies us the most internally — an API interface for payroll with DATEV.

For companies interested in a pilot partnership or an early-access programme, a look at the HELITS HRIS product page or a direct conversation with us is worthwhile.

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