We Built an HR Platform (Because Spreadsheets Were Killing Us)
No spreadsheets were consulted in the making of this announcement.
We built Arheev because our own HR process was a disaster.
Fourteen people. Time off tracked in Google Sheets. Employee records in Notion. Documents in Drive. Someone asks "how many vacation days do I have left?" and you have to open three tabs and do math.
We tried existing HR platforms. They were either too simple (basically just nicer spreadsheets) or way too complex (enterprise systems designed for 500+ employees that required training to use).
So we built something in between. Shipped it in February 2025. Here's what we learned.
The Actual Problem
Our HR "process" looked like this:
Someone requests time off:
- Send message in Slack
- Manager checks the Google Sheet to see if anyone else is off that week
- Manager manually updates the sheet
- Someone (hopefully) updates the yearly totals
- Forget to update it, realize two months later when someone asks why their vacation days are wrong
New employee joins:
- Add them to Slack, GitHub, email, Linear, Notion
- Forget to add them to the vacation sheet
- Remember three weeks later when they request their first day off
- Frantically try to remember their start date to calculate accrued time off
This is embarrassing to admit as a software company. We literally build systems for other people and couldn't manage our own HR.
Why We Couldn't Just Buy Something
We tried. Really.
BambooHR, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors - Built for 200+ person companies. We'd be paying for performance review modules, succession planning, compensation management... stuff we don't need.
Gusto, Rippling - Great for US companies. Less great when your team spans Europe and you don't need payroll (we use accountants for that).
Simple tools like Timetastic - Basically just makes the spreadsheet prettier. Still disconnected from everything else.
We needed something that could grow with us without forcing us to use features we didn't need yet.
What We Actually Built
Version 1.0 has the stuff we needed most urgently:
- Time off management: request, approve, track balances. The spreadsheet replacement.
- Employee records: basic info, employment details, documents, all in one place.
- Departments and positions: org structure without needing org chart software.
- Presence tracking: who's working, who's off, who's on vacation.
- A "Pulse" dashboard: see what's happening across your team without opening five tabs.
That's it. No AI making decisions. No "intelligent automation" that nobody asked for. Just the basics that actually work.
The One AI Feature (That We Actually Use)
We did add one AI-assisted thing: when reviewing time-off requests, the system flags potential conflicts.
"Three people from engineering are already off that week" or "This overlaps with the project deadline in Linear."
It doesn't auto-approve or auto-reject. Just surfaces information you'd otherwise have to look up manually. Turns out that's way more useful than trying to automate the actual decision.
What We're Still Building
We shipped with the core features working. But there's a lot we haven't built yet:
A recruitment module is coming later this year. Maybe. We're still figuring out the right approach.
Performance reviews are planned, but honestly we're not sure how to do this without it feeling like bureaucracy.
Integrations: right now you can export data. We want proper API integrations with Slack and Linear. It's on the list.
The Android app works, but the 16KB page size migration took three weeks and we're still finding edge cases.
Version 1.0 solves our immediate problem (getting out of spreadsheet hell). Everything else is roadmap.
The Migration Was Messier Than Expected
We used ourselves as the first real users. Migrated our own HR data from spreadsheets to Arheev in late January 2025.
Took two full days. Not because the import was hard, but because our spreadsheets were inconsistent. Some vacation days were in decimals, some in days. Some dates were formatted one way, some another. Realized we'd been calculating time-off accruals wrong for months.
If our own data was messy, everyone else's probably is too. So we built import tools that try to handle inconsistencies. They're not perfect, but they're better than expecting clean data.
Using It For Real
We've been running Arheev internally since late January. It's... mostly good.
The time-off requests work great. No more spreadsheet confusion.
The document storage is fine. Better than Drive folders, but we still forget to upload things.
The presence tracking gets ignored sometimes because remote work makes "presence" weird.
It just works better than what we had before. For a 1.0, that's enough.
If You're Also Drowning in Spreadsheets
Arheev is live. You can try it if you want. It's designed for teams like ours - 10-50 people, growing, don't need enterprise features yet.
Fair warning: it's not polished like the big players. We're still figuring out the UX in some areas. The mobile app works but isn't amazing. We're fixing bugs as people report them.
But if you're tracking HR in Google Sheets and it's driving you crazy, Arheev might be worth trying.
We built it because we needed it. If you have the same problem, it might work for you too.
