From Spreadsheet Chaos to One Staff Registry: A Step-by-Step HR Setup Guide
Replace the personnel spreadsheet and the shared drive full of scanned passports with one secure staff registry. Here's how to migrate, step by step.
If your "HR system" is a spreadsheet plus a shared drive folder called "Personnel - Confidential," you're not alone. Most Swiss SMEs start this way: one tab for contact details, another for contract types, a folder somewhere with scanned passports and CVs that nobody has reviewed since onboarding. It works until it doesn't — until a contractor's contract needs checking, an auditor asks about document access controls, or payroll needs a detail that HR entered differently.
HR Management in Flitz replaces that patchwork with a single staff registry — the same one Payroll reads from — so every person who works for you has one authoritative file. Here's how to move from the manual setup to the automated one, step by step.
Step 1: Take stock of who actually works for you
Before migrating anything, list everyone currently doing work for your business, and sort them by how they're engaged:
- Employees on your own payroll
- Contractors placed through a staffing vendor or agency
- Freelancers invoicing you through their own company
This distinction matters because Flitz tracks it as a first-class field on the staff file, not a note in a comment column. Getting this list right now saves reclassification work later — and it's usually the step that reveals who's been missing from your records entirely.
Step 2: Create one staff file per person
For each person on your list, create a staff file in HR Management with their personal details, employment type, and — critically — an emergency contact. Add the one-tap WhatsApp link while you're at it; it's a small thing, but it means nobody has to dig through a phone to reach a family member in a genuine emergency.
If the person was placed by a vendor, record the vendor on file. If they're a freelancer, record their own company. This is what makes the registry match reality instead of forcing every working relationship into an "employee" box because that's the only field the old spreadsheet had.
Step 3: Move documents off the shared drive
This is usually the step businesses have been putting off. Passport or ID scans and CVs sitting on a general shared drive are a liability — anyone with drive access can open them, and there's no record of who did.
In Flitz, staff documents go on private storage with SHA-256 checksums, hardened downloads, and a full audit trail of every upload, download, and deletion. Practically, this means:
- You can prove a document hasn't been altered since upload
- You can see exactly who accessed a passport scan and when
- Deletions are logged, not silent
Upload each person's passport/ID and CV directly into their staff file. Once this step is done, you can finally delete the old shared folder.
Step 4: Let AI do the CV parsing for you
Here's where the manual process usually stalls: nobody has time to go through every CV and manually tag skills, languages, and certifications. When you upload a CV into a staff file, Flitz's AI extracts this information automatically into searchable chips on the profile.
What to expect: upload the CV, wait a moment, and review the extracted chips. Correct anything that looks off — AI extraction is a head start, not a guarantee — but for most files this turns a blank skills section into a usable one in seconds instead of the twenty minutes it would take to do by hand.
Step 5: Connect staff files to Flitz logins for training visibility
If a staff member also has a Flitz login, link it to their staff file. Once linked, completed training courses and quiz scores appear inline in the file automatically — no separate training spreadsheet to reconcile. This is particularly useful for roles with mandatory refresher training or onboarding checklists you need to confirm were actually completed.
Step 6: Lock down access before you open the door to the rest of the team
Personnel data — passports, CVs, emergency contacts — should never be visible to the whole team just because they share a company tool. Flitz gates HR Management to Owner and Admin roles only. Before you invite managers or office staff into the platform generally, confirm who actually needs HR access and set roles accordingly. This is also a reasonable moment to document, internally, who holds Owner/Admin rights and why.
Step 7: Retire the spreadsheet — but only after a side-by-side check
Don't delete the old spreadsheet the day you finish migration. Instead, do a side-by-side pass: for each person, check that the staff file in Flitz matches or exceeds what the spreadsheet had. Once you've confirmed names, employment types, documents, and emergency contacts are all present and correct, archive the spreadsheet somewhere it can't be accidentally edited, and treat the Flitz registry as the single source of truth from that point on.
What changes once this is done
The practical payoff isn't just tidiness. Because HR Management shares its registry with Payroll, there's no duplicate person records to keep in sync between the two — update an address once, and both systems see it. Document handling moves from "hope nobody misuses the shared drive" to a checksummed, audited system. And CVs stop being static PDFs nobody reads, becoming searchable skill profiles instead.
None of this requires a big-bang rollout. Work through the steps person by person, team by team, and the registry builds itself up naturally — which is a far more realistic path for a small business than trying to migrate everyone in one afternoon.