Quick Background
When I started my first business, I didn’t have an experienced HR team. I didn’t have experienced people around me telling me how HR processes should work either. It was my first time running a business, and honestly, I had very little idea about how things worked in the HR space.
So, like most founders would, I started looking for HRMS software that could help me. I tried multiple HRM solutions. Instead of making things easier, most of them gave me another problem to solve.
They were complicated. They were difficult to understand. Navigation wasn’t intuitive, and many workflows felt disconnected from each other. I remember situations where I would be running payroll and suddenly the system would expect me to change something somewhere in the employee section.
Instead of helping me get there or explaining exactly what needed to be done, I would get a generic message. Then came the usual process:
- 1. Copy the message.
- 2. Search it on Google.
- 3. Try to understand what it means.
- 4. Go back into the HRMS.
- 5. Try something.
- 6. Realize that wasn’t it.
- 7. Search again.
Something that should have taken a few minutes could sometimes turn into days of figuring things out. And there was one question I kept thinking about: If I need to understand HR software before the software can help me understand HR, what problem is the software actually solving?
That experience eventually became one of the reasons behind building Zeba Pro. Our goal was simple: HR software shouldn’t become another tool your company has to learn. It should help you get the work done.
But once we actually started building an HRMS for Indian businesses, we learned that making HR simple is anything but simple. Here are some of the biggest things we’ve learned along the way.
1. Every Company Thinks About HR Differently
When we initially started building Zeba Pro, we thought creating an HRMS would be relatively straightforward.
- 1. Build attendance.
- 2. Build leaves.
- 3. Build payroll.
- 4. Build employee management.
- 5. Connect everything together.
- Done.
We couldn’t have been more wrong.
As we started working with different companies, we realized something very quickly: Almost every company has its own way of doing HR. Two companies of exactly the same size can have completely different leave policies. Their attendance rules can be different. Their salary structures can be different. Their payroll configurations can be different.
Even something that appears as simple as defining when someone is considered late can have completely different rules from one organization to another. That’s when our thinking about Zeba Pro started changing. We weren’t simply building features anymore.
We had to build enough flexibility for companies to operate according to their policies without making the software so configurable that users again needed days of training to understand it. And that balance between flexibility and simplicity has become one of the most difficult and important parts of building Zeba Pro.
2. Indian Payroll Is Far More Complicated Than It Looks
Payroll was probably one of the biggest reality checks for us. Initially, you think:
- 1. Take an employee’s salary.
- 2. Calculate deductions.
- 3. Apply statutory requirements.
- 4. Calculate taxes.
- 5. Generate payroll.
But when you actually start implementing payroll automation for different Indian companies, things become much more complicated. Every organization can have its own salary structure and payroll configuration.
And then there is another important stakeholder involved: the company’s CA. Companies often configure their payroll according to recommendations from their finance and accounting teams. Sometimes those recommendations align perfectly with what we have implemented. Sometimes a company has a legitimate requirement that applies because of an exceptional condition we hadn’t initially considered.
And sometimes businesses are following older processes based on information they have been using for years. From the customer’s perspective, however, the expectation is understandable: "This is how our payroll works. The software should support it."
That’s where building payroll software becomes difficult. You cannot simply hard-code one interpretation and expect thousands of companies to operate exactly the same way. At the same time, you can’t blindly allow every configuration without thinking about compliance.
This has taught us something important: Good payroll software needs to understand that there is a difference between calculation logic, company policy, configuration and statutory compliance. Building that flexibility while keeping payroll understandable for someone who isn’t a payroll expert is something we’re continuously working on.
3. Our Biggest Product Decisions Don’t Always Come From Us
One principle has become extremely important while building Zeba Pro: Customers are God to us. We don’t want to build Zeba Pro only in the direction we think HR software should go. We want to build it in the direction businesses actually need it to go.
That doesn’t mean blindly implementing every feature request. But whenever we receive a genuinely useful and valid request, we try to understand the underlying problem and implement it as quickly as we reasonably can.
And interestingly, some of our customers have been incredibly thoughtful about these workflows. One recent example was surprisingly simple. What happens when you disable an employee who is someone’s reporting manager?
Normally, disabling an employee sounds like a straightforward action. Click Disable. Done. Except it isn’t.
What if 15 employees report to that person? Those employees now have a reporting relationship pointing toward someone who is no longer active in the organization. A customer highlighted this problem to us. It made complete sense.
So we changed the workflow. Now, when someone tries to disable a user who has employees reporting to them, Zeba Pro checks those relationships and requires the reporting manager to be reassigned. It’s a small change when you look at the screen. But it’s an important change when you look at how organizations actually work.
And that’s something we’re learning repeatedly: The best HR workflows aren’t always invented in a product meeting. Sometimes they come directly from someone using the product every day.
4. Employee Exit Shouldn’t Be Disconnected From Employee Management
Another customer gave us an interesting piece of feedback around employee exits. Think about what happens when someone leaves an organization.
- 1. An exit request is created.
- 2. It goes through whatever approval process the company follows.
- 3. The employee’s exit is eventually approved.
But why should the HR team then have to go somewhere else in the software and manually disable that employee? These workflows are related. The software should understand that.
Based on feedback like this, we’ve been working toward making employee management increasingly connected. If an employee’s exit has been completed, actions related to that employee’s status should logically be available within that workflow.
This may sound obvious when you read it. But disconnected workflows are exactly what frustrated me when I first started using HR software as a business owner. And it’s something we’re determined not to repeat.
5. Sometimes Customers Tell You What the Market Needs Before You See It
Live location tracking is another good example. It wasn’t something we added simply because we wanted another feature on our website. Companies repeatedly asked us for it.
Eventually, when you hear the same requirement again and again, it’s no longer just a feature request. It’s a signal.
Businesses with field employees or distributed teams wanted better visibility into where employees were while working. So we built employee tracking into Zeba Pro. This experience also changed the way we think about our roadmap.
We obviously have our own product vision. But customer requests give us something incredibly valuable: real-world evidence of what businesses are actually struggling with today. A roadmap shouldn’t exist in isolation from that.
6. My Experience as an Employee Initially Gave Me the Wrong Perspective
This was probably one of my biggest personal learnings. Before building Zeba Pro, I had used HRMS products myself. But I had used them primarily as an employee, not as the person responsible for managing HR.
And most of the companies I had worked for were MNCs. That shaped my original perception of what an HRMS needed to do. The problem? What matters to a large enterprise isn’t necessarily what matters to a growing mid-market organization.
Take attendance as a simple example. In many large enterprises, the organization may primarily care about whether you’re completing the expected number of working hours. The exact minute you arrived at the office might not be the most important thing.
For many startups and growing businesses, however, attendance requirements can be completely different. They may need to know:
- 1. When did the employee arrive?
- 2. When did they leave?
- 3. How many hours did they work?
- 4. Where were they when they marked attendance?
- 5. Are they working from the correct office/location?
These requirements aren’t necessarily right or wrong. They’re simply different. And that’s one of the most important lessons building Zeba Pro has taught me: You cannot build HR software for growing businesses by simply taking enterprise HR software and making it cheaper. The requirements themselves can be fundamentally different.
7. HRMS Features Shouldn’t Behave Like Separate Applications
This brings me back to the original problem that pushed us toward building Zeba Pro. One of my biggest frustrations with HR software was never the absence of features. Most products already had plenty of features.
The problem was that those features often felt disconnected. Payroll existed. Employee management existed. Attendance existed. Leaves existed. Exit management existed. But as a user, you were responsible for understanding how everything connected.
We believe the software should take more responsibility for that.
If payroll cannot run because an employee configuration is incomplete, don’t just display an error. Tell the user exactly what’s wrong and help them get there.
If you’re disabling a manager who has employees reporting to them, don’t leave broken reporting relationships behind. Ask who those employees should report to now. If an employee’s exit process has been completed, don’t make HR remember another administrative step somewhere else. Connect those workflows.
That’s the difference between simply putting many HR features under one login and actually building an integrated HRMS.
8. The Hardest Part of Building Simple Software Is Everything Behind the Simplicity
There’s an interesting contradiction we’ve discovered while building Zeba Pro. Our original goal was to make HR software simple. And it still is. But we’ve realized that making something simple for the customer often requires significantly more complexity behind the scenes.
The user shouldn’t have to understand how ten different modules depend on each other. The software should. The user shouldn’t have to remember every consequence of disabling an employee. The software should check. The user shouldn’t have to become an expert in the product before completing basic HR operations. The product should guide them.
That’s the direction we’re continuously trying to take Zeba Pro. Not simply: "Here are 100 HR features." But: "Tell us what you’re trying to accomplish, and let’s make that process as straightforward as possible."
What Building Zeba Pro Has Taught Us So Far
We’re still learning. And honestly, I don’t think that process will ever stop. Every new organization introduces us to another way of handling attendance, payroll, leaves, employee management or internal policies.
Sometimes customers validate something we’ve already built. Sometimes they show us an edge case we never considered. And sometimes a simple customer suggestion makes us look at an entire workflow differently. That’s exactly how we want Zeba Pro to evolve. Because we’re not trying to build HR software based only on what we think companies need. We want to build it around how companies actually work.
For me personally, this journey started because I was a first-time business owner trying to understand HR while simultaneously trying to understand complicated HR software. I know what that frustration feels like.
And that’s ultimately the problem we’re trying to solve with Zeba Pro: An integrated HRMS where attendance, employees, leaves, payroll and other HR operations work together without requiring you to spend days learning another complicated tool.
We’re not there because we believe we’ve figured out every possible HR requirement. In fact, building Zeba Pro has taught us exactly the opposite. Every business is different. Every HR team works slightly differently. And there will always be another edge case we haven’t encountered yet.
The important thing is building a product and a team that is willing to listen when that next case arrives. That’s how we’re building Zeba Pro: one real business problem at a time. If you want to see how we handle these complexities so you don't have to, check out our pricing plans.
