In most companies with 20–50 people, a "leave request" looks the same everywhere: an intranet PDF, printout, employee signature, manager signature, scan, email to HR, manual entry into the HR system. The whole chain works — until someone forgets the scan, someone forgets to ask "can I take next week off?", and on Friday HR discovers that three people from the same team are all off on Monday.
This isn't a technical problem. It's an organizational one that stuck around because "it works." It works until you count how many hours a week disappear into typing the same data into three different places.
What it really costs
At one of our clients — a 38-person logistics and distribution company near Poznań — we ran a small time audit on the HR person's week. Leave requests, business trips, letters, early-out requests. All on paper or in email. The HR manager was spending about 6 hours per week on leave alone: entering into enova365, updating a spreadsheet leave calendar, answering emails asking "how many days do I have left?" Two incidents in the year: two people from the same team got the same day off because one manager didn't know the other had already approved their deputy's request.
Six hours a week isn't a disaster. But over a year that's nearly 300 hours — almost two full months of full-time work burned on moving the same data from one piece of paper into one database.
After they rolled out a simple portal (more on that in a moment), the same work takes the HR manager about 40 minutes a week. The rest of that time went into things somebody should have been doing all along — social security reconciliation, pension audits, staff casework.
What exactly a portal like this should do
What I'm talking about isn't an "HR system." It's a request portal — a microapp that does three things:
- the employee submits a request (leave, business trip, expense reimbursement, letter),
- the manager approves or rejects in two clicks from email or their phone,
- the HR system gets a clean entry without anyone retyping it.
Everything else — payroll, contracts, time tracking, pensions — stays where it is. The portal is a thin layer on top of what you already have. It doesn't replace your HR system, doesn't replace your time clock, doesn't try to be an "HR platform." It does one thing and does it well.
That distinction is crucial. Companies that walk into a big "HR project" typically finish 8 months later with a system that needs two full-time staff to run. Companies that do a request portal have it working in 3–6 weeks.
Three technologies worth choosing between
There's no single correct answer. The choice depends on what you already have and how much you want to invest.
Option 1: Microsoft 365 + Power Platform. If the company already has Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium (and most do), Power Apps + Power Automate + a SharePoint list gives you a portal that hosts itself. Extra license cost: 0 zł for most scenarios. External partner build cost: PLN 15,000–30,000. Time: 3–5 weeks. Downside: you need somebody in-house who can make small tweaks, or you pay for every typo.
Option 2: Ready-made SaaS. Products like HRnest, Symfonia HR SaaS, tetaHR — per-user pricing, 2–4 week implementation, support included. Annual cost for 40 people: PLN 8,000–20,000. Upside: nothing to maintain yourself. Downside: you'll always be doing what the vendor planned, and you'll pay every month. Integration with your HR system (enova365, Comarch Optima, Symfonia) sometimes exists, sometimes not — check the specific version you have before you sign.
Option 3: Custom web app. Makes sense if you have unusual processes (four-level approval, integration with production systems, a dozen request types with different logic). Cost: PLN 50,000–120,000 upfront plus maintenance. Time: 3–6 months. Only go this way when options 1 and 2 genuinely don't fit — not because "we want something of our own."
For 90% of SMEs the answer is option 1 or 2.
How not to wreck the rollout
HR portal rollouts fail for repeatable reasons. Five things to watch out for.
First — decide where the source of truth about employees lives. If the employee list is in enova365, the portal reads from enova365. If it's in Active Directory, it reads from AD. Don't try to maintain a second list "just for the portal" — after six months they'll be out of sync and it'll come back to you.
Second — approval must work from a phone. A department head who is at a client site gets an email with a link or a button in Teams — and approves in two seconds. If they have to go back to their laptop and log into a portal, requests will sit for a week.
Third — the team leave calendar must be visible to everyone. Not just the manager. An employee filing a request for June 12 has to see immediately that two other people on the team are already off then. That eliminates 80% of conflicts before they happen.
Fourth — don't automate broken processes. If a "business trip request" at your company needs four signatures across three departments and everybody thinks that's absurd — don't put that into Power Automate. Simplify the process first, then automate. Otherwise you get faster absurdity, not the absence of absurdity.
Fifth — have a plan B for approvals. What if the director is on holiday? Deputy. What if the deputy is too? Next person in the chain. Without this, requests sit for weeks and employees go back to emailing HR — because "at least someone answers there."
What the day after rollout looks like
Back to our logistics client near Poznań. Six weeks from project start the portal was in production. Three weeks after that:
- an employee files a request from their phone on the way home from work,
- the manager gets a Teams notification, clicks "approve",
- the portal saves the request to a SharePoint list,
- Power Automate pushes it into the enova365 leave module via API,
- on Friday the HR manager sees the list of approved requests in a ready report,
- the SharePoint department calendar shows everyone who's off and when.
Three things disappeared: emails to HR, the paper printout, the two-person argument about "but I asked first." What's left is what actually needs the HR manager's attention — non-standard cases, sick leave, disputes.
Where to start at your company
You don't need to buy a system next Monday. It's enough to do three things this week:
- Count on paper how many hours a week your HR person (or you) spend on requests. Multiply by 52. Multiply by the hourly rate.
- Write down what types of requests you have. Leave, business trip, early out, letter, whatever else. There's probably fewer than you'd think.
- Check which HR system you have and which version. Whether it has an API. Whether the vendor offers a self-service module (sometimes yes — nobody just turned it on).
That's half an hour of work. Enough to decide whether it's worth dealing with now or shelving for the second half of the year.
A request portal doesn't replace your HR system. It's a thin layer on top of what you already have — and that's exactly why it works.