Moving HR and payroll off the one spreadsheet nobody else can open

There is no button that turns a staff spreadsheet into OfficeYak the way there is for a student list. Upload a CSV of four hundred families and the column headings are read automatically, matched against what they mean rather than what they are called. Staff and payroll do not work that way, and the honest reason is that they do not need to: a consultancy's whole staff, even a busy four-branch office, is a dozen or two people, not four hundred rows, so typing each one in once is a smaller job than building an importer to avoid it would be.

What changes is not how the data arrives. It is what happens to it once it is in.

What actually gets typed in, and it is typed in once

Adding somebody is two separate steps, because OfficeYak keeps two separate records on purpose. The first is the HR record every manager needs to see: position, joining date, date of birth, phone, address, an emergency contact, whether they are full time, part time, on contract or an intern, and a salary band rather than a figure. A band answers every question a manager actually has without putting an exact number in front of everyone who can open the staff list.

The second is the payroll record, and only whoever holds the payroll permission can open it: the real monthly salary, bank name and account, PAN, and which deduction scheme applies, the Social Security Fund or the older provident fund, because Nepal's move between the two has not reached every office or every person inside one at the same time. A person's earlier roles can be added too, the way a CV holds them, which is the one part of the old HR file that a spreadsheet was never good at keeping anyway.

None of this is bulk. Each person is one form, filled in once, when they join or when you first bring the office across.

The register that replaces the attendance sheet

A spreadsheet attendance register is only as honest as whoever is typing into it, usually from memory, at the end of the day. OfficeYak's replaces that with a geofence: each branch has coordinates and a radius set once, and a clock-in from outside that radius is recorded as outside it rather than silently accepted. That one setting, done per office rather than per person, is what makes every staff member's attendance from that day onward something payroll can actually trust rather than retype.

This is also the one part of the move that is not staff-specific admin. Why the geofence matters for the office as a whole is worth reading once, because it decides what every subsequent payroll run is allowed to assume about the days on it.

The payroll run that opens itself, mostly

This is where the spreadsheet actually stops being needed, not the moment someone is added, but the first time a run is opened for them. Starting a payroll run for a branch and a month reads the salary already on file and the days that person actually clocked during that window, and fills both onto the line before anyone types a number. That calendar is the Nepali month, not a borrowed Gregorian one, which is its own reason the old spreadsheet was always fighting the dates as well as the arithmetic.

What is still typed in by a person is the deductions each run actually needs: the Social Security Fund or provident fund contribution, tax deducted at source, the Citizen Investment Trust contribution, any advance being recovered, and anything else, each on its own line rather than folded into one unexplained number. That is not a gap in the software. A payroll person still decides a bonus and still has to be told what an advance was, and no system should be guessing those on anyone's behalf. Once a run is marked paid, it locks, and nothing on it can be edited by anyone, including an owner, which a shared spreadsheet with edit access for whoever asks was never going to manage.

What does not come across, and does not need to

The months already run in the old spreadsheet stay there. Nothing reaches back and recreates January's payroll inside OfficeYak, and nothing needs to: the old file keeps being the record of what already happened, and the new system becomes the record of what happens from the day you start using it. That is a smaller and more honest promise than pretending years of history will migrate itself, and it is the same promise the student-side import makes about documents that were never in a spreadsheet to begin with.

Who is allowed to see what, once it moves

Nothing about this changes who should see what. A pay band on the staff list is visible to whoever manages people; the salary figure behind it is not, and sits behind its own permission rather than being handed out with every other staff screen. That separation is the same one worth deciding before anyone is hired, not after, and moving off a spreadsheet is a reasonable moment to actually enforce it, since a shared file rarely did.

Leaving is the same shape as arriving

If this ever stops being the right system, the same account that could have brought a spreadsheet in sends one back out: every employee record, every payroll run, every attendance day, as CSV files with real column names, on demand, with no password or bank login included. A consultancy that is wary of typing its staff and its payroll figures into anything is right to ask first how it gets them back out, and the honest answer is the same download either way.

Attendance and the geofence are on every plan including Free. Payroll itself begins at Growth, NPR 12,999 a month for up to 15 staff accounts across 5 offices, and Pro removes both ceilings for NPR 29,999. No plan charges by student, only by the people who need a login, and that ceiling is published rather than something you find out by hitting it.