Every HR system demos well. The screens are clean, the sample data is tidy, and the person showing it knows exactly which buttons to press. None of that predicts whether your company will still be using it next year.
These are the questions worth asking instead. They are the ones we would want asked of us, and a vendor who cannot answer them plainly is telling you something.
On approvals
- Can we change who approves what without calling you? If every threshold change is a support ticket, the process will stop matching the company within a quarter.
- Can approval rules differ by site, department or amount? A group with several arms does not have one process, and a system that assumes it does will be worked around.
- What happens when an approver is on leave? Ask them to show it, not describe it.
- Can a request be sent back with a reason, rather than only approved or rejected?
On your data
- If we leave in two years, what exactly do we get? The answer should be a full export in a format you can open without them.
- Who at your company can see our records, and is that logged?
- Do you log who viewed a record, or only who changed one? Most systems log changes. The question auditors actually ask is who looked.
On getting live
- How long, honestly, from signature to first real request? Weeks is reasonable for this kind of system. Quarters means services revenue, not software.
- Who does the data migration, and what does it cover? Staff lists and reporting lines are the minimum. Ask about open requests and leave balances, because those are the ones that hurt.
- What do we need on our side? If the answer assumes a dedicated IT function, price that in, because most companies this size do not have one.
On price
- Is this quoted in naira, and is it fixed for the term? A price that moves with an exchange rate is a budgeting problem, not a software one.
- What is the setup fee and what is the recurring fee? Both should appear on the same written quote.
- If we add a module next year, are we quoted the difference or a new licence?
- Are staff who work across two arms of the group counted twice?
Two questions that reveal the most
Beyond the checklist, two questions tend to separate systems that get adopted from systems that get abandoned.
"Show me the messiest process you have configured"
Any product can handle a clean approval chain. Ask to see an ugly one: the exception everybody works around, the site with a different rule, the approval that changes shape depending on the amount. If the answer is that such things need custom development, you have learned the real limit.
"What does this look like on a phone?"
The people who hold up approvals are usually the people least often at a desk. If approving a request needs a laptop, the requests will wait for one.
A note on payroll
Many buyers start by searching for payroll and HR together. They are genuinely different problems, and a system strong at one is not automatically strong at the other. We do not run payroll, and we would rather say so here than in a demo. If payroll is your first priority, buy for that, and ask how whatever you choose will exchange staff records with everything else.
Where we stand on our own list
We wrote these questions because they are the ones we get asked by the companies who go on to buy. Approval rules are settings rather than code, pricing is headcount plus the modules you switch on, export is available on request, and views are logged alongside changes.
Ask us the same list. If you would rather see it than hear it, bring the messiest process you have and we will configure it on the call.
See it against your own approval chain
A forty minute walkthrough, configured live on the call. Bring the messiest process you have.
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