Checklists
HR Audit Checklist for Small Businesses
Not a compliance audit — an operations one. Twelve statements about how HR actually runs in your company, answered honestly, scored, and turned into an order of work. Most small companies already know two of their answers before they start; the value is in finding the other ten.
Who it is for
- Founders who inherited HR and have never audited it
- HR managers arriving into a company with no documented processes
- Operations leads deciding where to spend the next quarter
- Anyone about to hire their first dedicated HR person
What it helps with
- See which parts of HR are running on one person’s memory
- Put a number on something that usually stays a feeling
- Decide what to fix first, with a reason
- Re-run it next quarter and see whether anything actually changed
The audit
Answer as things are today, not as they are meant to be. An audit you flatter tells you nothing you did not already believe.
| Area | In place | Needs work | Missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every current employee has a complete record we could find in two minutes | |||
| Signed paperwork and required documents are on file for everyone, including the older joiners | |||
| This month’s attendance is accurate and up to date as of today | |||
| Leave balances are calculated the same way for everyone, and employees can see their own | |||
| Open roles, candidates and their stages are tracked somewhere other than an inbox | |||
| A new joiner’s first week runs the same way regardless of who is handling it | |||
| Every employee has had a documented conversation about their work in the last twelve months | |||
| Payroll inputs are collected the same way each month, against a cut-off everybody knows | |||
| Leavers follow a defined checklist, and access is closed on the last working day | |||
| The main HR processes are written down well enough for somebody else to run them | |||
| Headcount, attrition and monthly people cost can be produced without rebuilding a spreadsheet | |||
| HR data lives in one known place, with known access, and no forgotten copies elsewhere |
0/ 24
0 of 12 answered — the reading firms up as you go
- 80% and above — Solid foundation
- HR runs as a process rather than as a person. Your work now is depth — better reporting, better performance conversations — rather than repair. Re-run this in six months.
- 55% and above — Workable, but fragile
- The essentials happen, but several of them depend on one person remembering. Pick the two lowest-scoring areas and write them down properly this quarter; that alone usually moves you a band.
- 30% and above — Held together by individuals
- This works while nothing goes wrong. A resignation, a sick week or a growth spurt will expose it. Start with records and payroll inputs — they are the two where mistakes cost money rather than time.
- 0% and above — Start here
- Nothing unusual for a company that grew faster than its admin. Do three things in order: get every employee record complete in one place, define one repeatable payroll input process, and write down what happens when somebody joins.
What to do with the result
The total matters less than the pattern. Two rows marked missing in the same area — records and documentation, say, or payroll and reporting — is a bigger signal than a scattering of needs work across twelve.
Pick the two lowest and give each an owner and a date ninety days out. Then put a reminder in the calendar to run this again the day after that. An audit run once is an opinion; run twice it is a measurement.
How to use it
- Answer it yourself first, then have one other person answer it independently. Where the two of you disagree is usually the most interesting row on the page.
- Do not average out a row. If documentation is complete for recent joiners and patchy for people who joined three years ago, that is "needs work", not "in place".
- Take the two lowest rows, give each one an owner and a date ninety days out, and ignore the rest for now.
- Diarise a re-run. The comparison between two scores is worth more than either score.
Questions people ask
Quarterly while you are actively fixing things, then twice a year once the score stops moving. More often than quarterly and nothing has had time to change.
It usually means you grew faster than your admin, which is the normal order of events. The score is about how much of your HR depends on individual memory, not about whether anyone has been careless.
Where to go next
Flabido keeps the everyday HR work of a growing Indian company in one place — people records, leave, attendance, payroll inputs, hiring and letters. See what it does or ask for a free trial.