How the Kolm Tilli HR team retired nearly a dozen Excel files
A real customer story from Kolm Tilli - a Tartu street-food restaurant whose HR team lived for years next to one workforce tool plus ~10 Excel files. Here's how the work got consolidated, and what the development team learned from them.
- hours24 team
Kolm Tilli is a street-food restaurant in Tartu's Aparaaditehas, part of the Seven & Sons group. Its daily rhythm combines breakfast, brunch, street food, pizza, a cocktail bar, events and catering - and an HR workload that is rarely just contracts, schedules and leave requests.
For the Kolm Tilli HR team, that workload meant one piece of workforce software plus nearly a dozen Excel files. One file for employee data, another for staff family information, separate files for assets, equipment, daily routines and other details. Not a bad system - a practical one. But at some point the question quietly surfaced: how much of our time goes into keeping the data tidy, instead of into actually supporting the people?
When HR work starts living across many separate files
Before adopting hours24, Kolm Tilli used a competitor's workforce software alongside multiple Excel files, because the existing system couldn't hold all the personnel detail in one place. The data was all there - it was just scattered. A quick overview of one employee, their family info, their equipment or daily-work details required moving between files.
This pattern is familiar to many HR teams. Excel doesn't survive because people love spreadsheets - it survives because real life tends to be more detailed than the software in use.
Why Excel appears even when you already have a tool
When workforce or time-tracking software is in place, outsiders often assume the spreadsheets should disappear. In practice they don't. Excel grows wherever flexibility is needed: information the existing system doesn't ask for, notes nobody anticipated at rollout, exceptions and team-specific ways of working.
In a restaurant, those nuances multiply. Schedules shift, people move between roles, equipment is issued and returned, staff work in different locations. The right question isn't whether the company has software - it's whether the software actually supports the work the HR team does every day.
Real input into development: Elisabeth and Merily
Kolm Tilli's experience mattered to hours24 because their HR team weren't just users - they were a source of input. Elisabeth and Merily worked closely with the development team to share what real working life requires: how a schedule is actually built, what's missing, which steps take too long, what information needs to be visible fast, and which Excel files exist only because there's no better place in the system to hold the information.
That collaboration produced a clearer understanding: a work schedule in a restaurant isn't a list of shifts. It's the centerpiece of how the operation runs - affecting people, service quality, workload and the manager's peace of mind.
One big shift: less manual checking
When a company runs on nearly a dozen Excel files, the biggest problem isn't the number of files. It's how much information has to be kept current by hand. When employee data changes, someone has to know everywhere else it lives. When an asset moves between people, it has to reach the right table. When the schedule changes, the relevant parties need to see it.
The more files there are, the more opportunities exist for something to fall through the cracks. In HR work, that doesn't just mean inconvenience - it means duplicate work, confusion, and decisions made on stale data. For Kolm Tilli the important step was that many pieces of info previously kept in Excel moved into a single workflow. Excel doesn't vanish overnight; the need to scatter critical HR data does.
What other HR teams can take from this
Kolm Tilli's story isn't about one restaurant or one tool. It's about a pattern many companies recognise: as HR work grows, side spreadsheets appear quietly. They start as conveniences. At some point they become a shadow system whose operation depends too much on individual people and their memory.
The better question for an HR team isn't "How many Excel files do we have?" It's "What work are those Excel files actually doing for us?"
If a spreadsheet holds information used every week to make decisions, it probably deserves a proper home. If the same data is being entered in multiple places, that's a sign of duplication. If only one person knows where a piece of info lives, that's an organisational risk.
In summary
For Kolm Tilli's HR team, the core of the change wasn't switching software - it was tidying the workflow itself. Nearly a dozen Excel files showed that HR work was detailed, practical and well thought out. They also showed that important information had ended up in too many separate places.
Adopting hours24 brought much of that information into one system, and the collaboration with Elisabeth, Merily and the Kolm Tilli HR team gave product development a direction grounded in real work.
The simplest lesson: if your HR team needs several parallel spreadsheets to keep the company running, the problem usually isn't the people or Excel. It's a sign that the company's processes have grown larger than its current tools.
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