HRFlow

The challenge

Before

The founder had identified a real gap: over a million Philippine SMBs were still computing payroll manually in Excel, making frequent errors on SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, and BIR withholding tax calculations, and keeping employee records in physical folders. The opportunity was clear but the risk of over-building was real. The founder needed a shippable, credible product — not a prototype, not a demo — that would let early customers validate the core value proposition and give investors something concrete to evaluate. Budget and timeline were both tightly constrained.

• Philippine SMBs computing payroll manually in Excel with no audit trail
• Frequent errors in SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, and BIR withholding tax calculations
• Employee 201 files kept in physical folders with no digital backup
• No leave management system — requests tracked informally via chat or verbal approval
• No self-service payslip access for employees
• Founders manually chasing attendance records from team leads every cutoff
• No multi-company support — founders with two businesses had to maintain two separate systems

The solution

What we built

We ran a structured discovery sprint to define the minimum feature set that would prove the value proposition without over-building. The HRFlow MVP covers employee profiles and 201 file management, attendance logging and leave request workflows with approval routing, automated payroll computation with up-to-date SSS, PhilHealth, Pag-IBIG, and BIR withholding tax tables, digital payslip generation and employee self-service access, and a payroll summary and government contribution report module. Multi-company support was built in from day one. The entire MVP shipped in 11 weeks.

How the system flows

1. Company Setup→Employee Onboarding→201 Profile→Document Upload→Access Assignment
2. Attendance Log→Daily Time Record→Leave Request→Approval Workflow→Payroll-ready Record
3. Payroll Run→Government Contribution Auto-computation (SSS/PhilHealth/Pag-IBIG/BIR)→Payslip Generation→PDF Export
4. Employee Self-service→Payslip Access→Leave Balance→Attendance History
5. Admin→Payroll Summary Report→Contribution Reports→BIR Alphalist Export