5 Google Sheets Automations Every HR Team Needs
HR Teams Are Drowning in Manual Spreadsheet Work
Human resources is one of the most spreadsheet-dependent functions in any small business. Leave balances, employee records, onboarding tasks, payroll calculations, recruitment tracking, and performance reviews — it all lives in Google Sheets. And for good reason: Sheets is free, flexible, and everyone on the team already knows how to use it.
The problem is not the spreadsheet. It is the manual work that surrounds it. HR professionals spend hours every week copying data between tabs, sending follow-up emails, calculating leave balances by hand, and compiling reports that could generate themselves. These repetitive tasks are exactly what Google Sheets automation with Apps Script was designed to eliminate.
Here are five automations that every HR team should implement. Each one saves hours of work per month and reduces the errors that come from doing things manually.
1. Automated Leave Tracking and Approval
What It Does
A leave tracking system in Google Sheets manages time-off requests from submission through approval, automatically calculates remaining balances, and keeps a historical record of all leave taken. Employees submit requests by filling in a row or a linked Google Form. The system handles everything else.
How Automation Helps
Without automation, leave tracking is a constant back-and-forth. An employee emails their manager, the manager checks for conflicts, replies with an approval, and someone in HR manually updates the sheet and recalculates balances. The whole process takes days for something that should take minutes.
With automation, the experience changes completely. An employee submits a request. The system automatically checks for conflicts, notifies the right approver, and gives them a one-click response. Balances update instantly. The employee gets a confirmation. The team calendar reflects the change. What used to involve multiple emails and manual spreadsheet updates now runs itself.
The system also handles the math that nobody wants to do by hand — accrual calculations, carry-over limits, probation period restrictions, and different leave types all compute automatically based on rules you define once.
2. Onboarding Checklists That Run Themselves
What It Does
When a new hire joins the company, there are dozens of tasks that need to happen — and they involve multiple people across different departments. IT needs to set up accounts, HR needs to send paperwork, the manager needs to schedule introductions, finance needs to add them to payroll. An automated onboarding checklist assigns these tasks, tracks their completion, and follows up automatically when things fall behind.
How Automation Helps
When a new hire is added to the system, their personalized onboarding checklist generates automatically. Every responsible person — IT, HR, their manager, finance — gets notified of their assigned tasks with clear deadlines. As tasks are completed, the dashboard updates in real time. Overdue tasks trigger automatic reminders that escalate appropriately.
This eliminates the most common onboarding failure: things falling through the cracks. When every task is tracked and every responsible person is held accountable by the system, new hires get a consistent experience regardless of how busy the team is that week. HR gets a bird's-eye view of all active onboardings without chasing anyone for updates.
3. Payroll Calculator with Automatic Deductions
What It Does
A payroll calculator sheet computes gross pay, applies deductions (taxes, benefits, retirement contributions), and produces net pay figures for each employee on a per-pay-period basis. It maintains a historical record of all payroll runs and generates summary reports.
How Automation Helps
Manual payroll calculation is tedious and error-prone. Different employees have different salary structures, tax brackets, benefit elections, and deduction schedules. Doing this by hand every two weeks is a recipe for mistakes — and payroll mistakes erode employee trust faster than almost anything else.
An automated payroll sheet handles the math automatically. It pulls each employee's compensation details, applies the correct deductions and withholdings, factors in overtime from linked timesheets, and produces accurate net pay figures. When payroll is finalized, the system generates summaries and archives historical data for future reference.
Important caveat: this is not a replacement for proper payroll software if you have complex compliance requirements, multi-state taxation, or direct deposit integration. But for small businesses that currently calculate payroll manually, an automated sheet is a massive improvement in accuracy and efficiency.
4. Recruitment Pipeline Tracker
What It Does
A recruitment pipeline tracker manages open positions, tracks candidates through interview stages, records feedback, and provides visibility into hiring progress. Think of it as a lightweight applicant tracking system built entirely in Google Sheets.
How Automation Helps
Recruitment involves coordinating multiple people across multiple stages — resume review, phone screen, technical interview, culture fit interview, reference check, and offer. Without a system, candidates slip through the cracks, interviewers forget to submit feedback, and hiring managers lose visibility into where each candidate stands.
An automated pipeline keeps everything moving. When a candidate advances to a new stage, the next interviewer is notified automatically. Feedback reminders fire on schedule so evaluations do not stall the process. A dashboard gives HR and hiring managers a bird's-eye view of all open positions — candidate counts by stage, average time per stage, and which positions have been open the longest.
The system can also handle candidate communication automatically — acknowledgment emails when they apply, notifications when they advance, and professional responses when they are not selected. Candidates get a better experience, and your team does not have to write individual emails for every status change.
5. Performance Review Automation
What It Does
A performance review system in Google Sheets manages the entire review cycle — distributing self-assessment forms, collecting manager evaluations, calculating aggregate scores, and compiling review summaries. It replaces the chaotic email-based process most small companies use.
How Automation Helps
Performance reviews are universally dreaded, and a big reason is the process itself. HR sends emails asking managers to complete reviews. Managers procrastinate. Results come in different formats. The whole cycle takes weeks when it should take days.
An automated system standardizes everything. When review season begins, individualized review forms are generated and distributed automatically. Self-assessment questions, evaluation criteria, and rating scales are consistent across the organization. No more managers freestyling their own format.
The system tracks completion in real time — a dashboard shows who has submitted, who is in progress, and who has not started. Automated reminders escalate as deadlines approach. Once reviews are complete, the system compiles summary analytics: ratings by department, score distributions, and comparisons to previous cycles. This gives leadership the data to identify top performers, spot teams that need support, and track development trends over time.
Completed reviews are archived securely, creating a historical record invaluable for promotion decisions, compensation adjustments, and development planning.
Getting Started With HR Automation
You do not have to implement all five automations at once. Start with the one that causes the most pain on your team. For most HR teams, that is either leave tracking or onboarding — these are the processes with the most back-and-forth communication and the highest risk of things falling through the cracks.
Each of these automations requires thoughtful Apps Script development to handle the edge cases, permissions, and reliability that a real team depends on. If your team does not have that expertise in-house, Refitted builds custom automated Google Sheets systems for HR teams — from leave tracking and onboarding checklists to payroll calculators and recruitment pipelines. We scope the system to match your exact workflow and deliver a sheet your team can use from day one — no coding required on your end.
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