An illustrative example. Monday morning. Eglė, the HR manager at a manufacturing company in Kaunas, opens her email and counts: seven leave requests, three requests to correct working hours, two new hires waiting for their onboarding documents, and a manager asking whether he can see the team's vacation schedule. All of this before 9 a.m. That is her everyday reality: a large part of her working time goes not into managing people but into collecting data and coordinating manual work.
The Lithuanian Labor Code requires precise records of working time, vacations and overtime. Mistakes cost fines and legal disputes. But precision and manual work are a poor combination. That is where HR process automation comes in: instead of a person collecting, checking and passing data along by hand, a system does it.
In this article I cover why HR automation matters especially for small businesses, which five processes pay off fastest, how much time a manufacturing company could save (an illustrative calculation), and three steps to get started without an IT specialist.
Why does HR automation matter for small businesses?
Large corporations have dedicated HR teams and expensive HRIS systems. A small business often has one person who has to hire, handle the admin, train and resolve conflicts. In small and medium-sized companies, the person responsible for HR often spends a good deal of time every week on purely administrative work: preparing documents, moving data between systems, sending reminders and putting together reports.
Manual mistakes cost money. Wrongly calculated vacation days, a missed onboarding document, unrecorded overtime: each of these can end with an employee complaint to the State Labor Inspectorate and, if a violation is found, an administrative fine under the Code of Administrative Offenses. An automated system records everything automatically, which takes human error out of the equation.
Automation does not mean job losses. This is the most common myth. An HR specialist who no longer has to compile vacation summaries by hand gets back a good amount of time every week, and can spend it on recruiting, employee development and building the company culture. That is better work, not lost work.
Economies of scale. As a company grows from 20 to 50 employees, manual HR admin grows almost linearly: more employees means more documents, more questions, more coordination. An automated system grows with the company at no extra cost: 20 or 100 leave requests are processed equally fast.
Which HR processes can you automate? 5 to start with today
Not all HR processes are equally suited to automation. Start with the ones that repeat most often and need the fewest decisions. Here are five processes that pay off fastest in a small business:
1. New employee onboarding
Manual onboarding often takes several hours of the HR manager's time for each new hire: preparing the document pack, sending login details, arranging meetings with the team and answering a dozen standard questions. In an automated process, creating the new employee in the system triggers the whole sequence: it sends the document set for e-signature, creates accounts in the systems they need, sends a structured first-week program and reminds the manager about the meeting. The HR specialist only checks that everything happened; she does not handle each step herself.
2. Leave requests and approval workflows
Managing leave is one of the most time-consuming HR processes: the employee sends a request, the manager approves or rejects it, HR records it, and accounting gets the information. An automated system (built on Make.com or Zapier) lets the employee fill in a form that automatically sends the approval request straight to the manager, checks whether anyone else is on leave during that period and, once approved, automatically updates the vacation summary in a Google Sheets spreadsheet and notifies the accounting system. The whole flow runs without manual work.
- 1The employee fills in a formGoogle Forms
- 2The remaining balance and who else is off are checkedMake.com
- 3The manager approves with one clickEmail
- 4The summary is updated and accounting is notifiedGoogle Sheets · accounting software
3. Time tracking and integration with accounting
Time tracking is one of the Labor Code requirements that is expensive to get wrong. An automated system collects working time data from a time tracking tool (Toggl, Clockify or even Google Forms), aggregates it weekly and automatically sends the summary to the accountant. Errors from copying data between systems by hand become impossible, because the data moves directly.
4. Reminders for regular reviews and tracking results
Regular 1-on-1 conversations and annual reviews are good practice, but small companies often postpone them "until things calm down". An automated system sends reminders to managers and employees on a preset schedule, collects summaries of results and records the agreed goals in a structured form. The history does not disappear into an email archive; it is visible in one place.
5. CV screening and collecting initial candidate data
In a small company, recruiting often means the HR manager personally reads every CV and sends each candidate a separate email. With automation, a structured candidate form collects the essential data up front, an AI module (n8n with a Claude or GPT integration) does the initial screening against the must-have criteria, and suitable candidates automatically get the information about the next stage. The HR specialist starts with an already filtered list instead of an unstructured pile of CVs.
Illustrative example: a manufacturing company in Kaunas (50 employees)
An illustrative example (not a specific client): a typical company making metal structures has one HR manager who handles the admin for 50 employees on her own. The biggest problems are leave management and timesheets. People work in shifts, and agreeing on a vacation turns into a process of several days every time: phone calls to managers, checking that there are enough people on shift for the period, correcting the timesheet in a manual Excel file and informing the accountant.
Before automation. Each leave request takes the HR manager 45 minutes on average. With up to 20 requests a month, that is 15 hours just on leave admin. Timesheets take another 8–10 hours a month to transfer data from paper sheets into Excel and from there to the accountant by email. There are 2–3 timesheet errors a month on average, each needing a correction and confirmation from both sides.
A possible solution: Make.com + Google Sheets + an e-signature integration. In this case, a three-part system would be set up: employees would submit leave requests through a structured Google Forms form; a Make.com workflow would automatically check the leave balance, send the manager an approval request by email and, once approved, update the central Google Sheets summary; the accountant would receive an automatic weekly working time summary straight to her inbox. For onboarding documents, an e-signature integration lets new employees sign contracts and acknowledgment forms without leaving home.
Expected result (an indicative calculation). Leave admin could drop from 45 minutes to about 5 minutes per request (just a review and a click on the approve button). Manual data transfer for timesheets would be eliminated. In this scenario, the total saving could reach about 8 hours a week. The risk of Labor Code violations would go down, because the system would record the data automatically and flag possible problems. The HR manager can spend the freed-up time on recruiting and mentoring new employees.
NowWith automation
One leave request
Transferring timesheet data
An illustrative calculation from the example above (for timesheets, the upper end of 8–10 hours).
How to automate HR processes: 3 steps without an IT specialist
HR automation does not require coding skills or expensive systems. The right start is one process that is clearly defined and repeats often. Here are three steps that let you start within a week:
Step 1: identify the three most time-consuming processes. Track your time for a week: how many minutes a day go into leave admin, onboarding documents, timesheets and answering employee questions. Rank them by time. For your first automation, pick the process that takes the most time, is clearly defined and repeats at least a few times a week.
Step 2: choose the right automation platform. There are three main options for small businesses in Lithuania. Make.com: visual and intuitive, with excellent Google Workspace integration, ideal for beginners; it suits leave and onboarding workflows. Zapier: the widest choice of integrations (thousands of apps), a good fit if you already use specific tools that need to be connected. n8n: an open-source platform you can host on your own server; the best choice when data privacy is critical or you need more complex logic and AI integration.
Step 3: bring in an automation consultant for the setup. Technically, you can configure your first workflow yourself by following YouTube tutorials, but setup mistakes, especially in time tracking, can be costly. A professional consultant configures the workflow in one day, tests it with real data and trains your team to change the settings without technical help. The investment starts at €450 for the first solution, with support from €150/month; the payback time depends on how much employee time is saved.
More about automation services and pricing: business process automation and AI agent development.
Frequently asked questions
How much does HR automation cost for a small company?
Automating the first HR process starts at €450, with support from €150/month. That covers the needs analysis, workflow setup, testing and training. A full core HR package (leave requests + onboarding + time tracking) starts at €600–900. Automation platform fees (Make.com, Zapier, n8n) range from €0 (free plans or self-hosted n8n) to a few dozen euros a month, depending on the choice and volume; prices change. An illustrative calculation: if the HR manager saves 8 hours a week and an employee hour costs €15, the monthly return is €480.
Is HR automation compliant with the Lithuanian Labor Code?
Yes. Correctly configured automation workflows are not only compliant with the Labor Code but help you follow it more precisely than a manual process. The system automatically records the date and time a request was submitted and approved, keeps the full document history and warns about possible violations (for example, when the minimum annual leave has not been granted). If the Labor Inspectorate carries out a check, all the data is in one place and can be exported with one click.
Which automation platforms work best for Lithuanian companies?
I most often recommend three. Make.com: the best choice for beginners, with a visual editor and excellent Google Workspace integrations, popular among Lithuanian companies that run on Google Workspace. Zapier: suits you if you use US-made SaaS tools (HubSpot, Slack, Trello) and has the widest integration ecosystem. n8n: an open-source option you can host on your own VPS; popular with companies that care about GDPR compliance and do not want employee data passing through third-party servers.
Will automation work with the systems we already use?
Make.com, Zapier and n8n integrate with practically all popular business systems: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Slack, Teams, and popular Lithuanian accounting programs via API or Excel export. If you use specific Lithuanian tools without a standard API, n8n lets you build custom connectors. Before the setup, I run a systems audit that shows the specific integration architecture for your company.