The myth of the integrated HRIS
Ask ten HR directors of French SMEs or mid-sized companies: "Do you have an HRIS?". Nine will answer yes. Then ask them to name their tools. You will discover payroll software, a leave management tool, a recruitment platform, an annual review module, a digital contract vault, an expense report application and sometimes a connected time clock. Six vendors. Six contracts. Six invoices that rise every year. And as many connectors that break with every version upgrade.
That's not an HRIS. It's a layer cake.
HR software marketing has sold the idea of best of breed for ten years: take the best tool for each need and make them talk to each other. The result in the field is rarely what was promised. Your employees log in to six different portals to request leave, sign an amendment, submit an expense report and complete their annual review. Your HR director spends days in Excel gluing the pieces back together. Your CFO discovers the real payroll cost three months after closing.
The French layer cake
The French HRIS market is one of the most fragmented in Europe. Lucca covers leave, reviews and expense reports. Cegid and Silae share payroll. Talentsoft and Workable compete for recruitment. DocuSign and Yousign dominate electronic signature. Notilus and Spendesk position themselves on expense reports. Cornerstone and 360Learning cover training. Bodet and Kelio supply time-clock systems.
For an SME of 80 employees, it is not unusual to stack five to seven HR subscriptions at once. Each vendor charges between €5 and €15 per employee per month. Do the math: for 80 people, that is between €24,000 and €80,000 a year, excluding setup fees, connectors and integration services.
On top of that comes an invisible but very real cost: the time lost gluing data back together. When an employee changes position, their contract is in tool A, their leave in tool B, their reviews in tool C, their payroll in tool D. Every change must be replicated manually or through connectors billed per line transferred. HR data flows poorly, arrives late, and always ends up consolidated in Excel.
Six vendors. Six contracts. Six invoices that increase every year. And zero data cross-referenced with your project margin.
The hidden cost of "best of breed"
Beyond subscriptions, stacking generates three structural costs that are rarely quantified:
The integration cost. Each connector between two HR tools costs between €3,000 and €15,000 to set up. And every version upgrade of one of the two tools requires a rework, billed again. Over a five-year horizon, a payroll-HRIS connector can cost as much as the license itself.
The reversibility cost. When a vendor decides to shut down a product line or migrate its customers to another solution in its portfolio, the end customer pays for the switch. The recent case of Cegid HR Sprint, whose customers are invited to switch to Silae for the benefit of the same majority shareholder, illustrates this logic. You pay twice: once to leave, once to arrive.
The cost of lacking management visibility. Without HR data consolidated with accounting and production, it is impossible to calculate project margin in real time including actual payroll. You run your company by looking in the rear-view mirror, three months behind.
What Odoo 19 does natively
While the French HRIS market fragmented, Odoo built over fifteen years a coherent HR coverage, integrated into its ERP core. Odoo 19 today covers all the HR processes of an SME or mid-sized company, in the same database, with no connector.
Employee file and org chart
Each employee has a complete record: personal details, contact details, successive contracts, documents, certifications, training completed, assessed skills. The org chart is generated dynamically from reporting relationships. A native hierarchical view lets you explore the company by department, manager or function.
Recruitment and employee referrals
Open positions are published directly on the company website. Applications arrive in a visual kanban-style pipeline. Automatic CV parsing extracts name, phone and email address to pre-fill candidate records. Qualification surveys can be sent in one click. The Referrals module manages internal referrals with a points and rewards system: each employee who recommends a candidate earns points as the application progresses through the pipeline.
Leave, balances and absences
Allocation rules are fully configurable: paid leave, RTT (working-time reduction days), seniority days, special leave, unpaid leave. Balances are calculated in real time. Requests go through a multi-level validation workflow configurable by absence type. Validated absences automatically feed into the planning and block project assignments.
Attendance and planning
Check-in/check-out is done via a physical badge reader, tablet kiosk, mobile app or web interface. Planning works by role: each role is linked to a list of employees able to take it on, and self-assignment of open shifts automatically finds available resources based on declared skills and recorded unavailability.
Annual reviews, 360° and skills
Review campaigns are scheduled automatically according to seniority or the defined frequency. Each review includes an employee self-assessment section, a manager assessment section and a joint review. The 360° lets you request feedback from peers, subordinates and internal customers. The goal library offers reusable templates with sub-goals and prerequisites. The skills progression report measures individual and collective progress over rolling periods.
Internal training and certifications
The e-learning module lets you build internal training paths with videos, quizzes and certifications validated by exam. All certificates and certifications are recorded in the employee file with the date obtained and the expiry date. Automatic tracking of expiry dates alerts the manager when a renewal is approaching. This native traceability considerably eases building a Qualiopi file for training organizations.
Expense reports
The employee photographs a receipt from the mobile app. Automatic reading extracts amount, date, VAT and category. The request goes through a configurable validation workflow. Once approved, the expense report is posted automatically and the reimbursement is included in the next payroll transfer or paid separately. No intermediate file, no accounting re-entry.
Electronic signature
The Sign module is natively integrated and compliant with the European eIDAS regulation (EU 910/2014). Employment contracts, amendments, non-disclosure agreements, internal rules and any internal document can be signed electronically with legal value recognized across the European Union. Each signature is timestamped, traced and automatically archived in the signing employee's file.
Vehicle fleet
Assignment of company and service vehicles, tracking of lease contracts, costs per employee, claims and maintenance are managed in the same environment. Benefits in kind calculated on the fleet flow to payroll without manual entry.
The breakthrough doesn't come from the list
Odoo 19's functional coverage of HR is now comparable to that of Lucca, Talentsoft or Cornerstone taken separately. But that is not where the value lies. The real breakthrough comes from native integration with the rest of the information system.
A few concrete examples, seen at our clients:
- Skills feed project assignment. A project manager is looking for a Python developer available next week. Odoo cross-references the skills framework, unavailability and project workloads in real time and suggests matching profiles.
- Time flows into project margin and into payroll. An employee logs time on their jobs. The hours automatically feed the project margin calculation AND the payroll variables (overtime, production bonuses). One entry, two uses.
- A hire triggers the entire onboarding journey. Record creation, contract generation from the template, sending for electronic signature, creation of access, enrollment in the mandatory training plan, assignment of equipment, alert to the manager. No manual intervention.
- A dashboard cross-references payroll, margin per job and customer invoicing in real time. The CFO immediately sees the effect of a hire on a project's margin, or the impact of a pay raise on the hourly cost price. Not in a €80,000 BI cube. In Odoo's native screen.
And French payroll?
French payroll remains an exception. Its regulatory complexity, the frequency of legislative changes and the need to reopen closed payslips make it a domain where general-purpose solutions struggle. Odoo offers a payroll localization for many countries, but we believe French payroll deserves a dedicated tool.
At ANOR, we chose Openpaye, an independent French solution developed by VMG Soft. Openpaye is designed for upcoming requirements, able to reopen and recalculate closed payslips without technical contortions, with a team that follows every regulatory change.
We developed the Openpaye - Odoo synchronization module. Employees, contracts, variable items and accounting entries flow in both directions, in real time, with no intermediate file. The HR director enters in Odoo what falls under HR. The payroll manager works in Openpaye. Neither re-enters what the other has done.
What it really costs
For an SME of 80 employees, here is an order of magnitude of the annual cost of a unified Odoo + Openpaye HR stack compared with a classic stack:
- Typical stack (Lucca + Cegid + Talentsoft + DocuSign + Notilus + connectors): between €50,000 and €80,000 a year, excluding integration services and internal consolidation time.
- Unified Odoo Enterprise + Openpaye + synchronization module stack: between €20,000 and €35,000 a year, native integration, consolidated data, a single point of contact.
The annual saving is between 30% and 60% depending on the scope covered. But the real gain is not there. It lies in the disappearance of time lost gluing data back together, in the reliability of management information, in the ability to measure HR performance in real time and in regained sovereignty over data.
Who is it for?
This approach is relevant for French SMEs and mid-sized companies of 30 to 500 employees that share four characteristics:
- A structured HR function that is saturated by administration
- A desire to manage economic performance by cross-referencing HR and operations
- Weariness with stacked SaaS subscriptions that increase every year
- Sensitivity to data sovereignty and vendor independence
It is particularly suited to trading, services and manufacturing companies, and to training organizations aiming for or maintaining their Qualiopi certification.
The big clean-up
HR directors juggling five subscriptions. CFOs validating renewals up 12% every year. Executives who don't know what your HR function really costs. You were sold on the best of breed logic. Today you are reaping the bill for worst of integration.
There is another way. It is open, integrated, sovereign and ultimately cheaper. At ANOR, we deploy this stack at French SMEs and mid-sized companies that have had enough of the layer cake.
The time for the big clean-up has come.