How Northwind cut HR admin time by 70% in six months
When their headcount tripled in two years, Northwind's HR team was buried in spreadsheets. SignHR replaced four tools and gave them their evenings back.
−70%
HR admin time
4 → 1
Tools replaced
12 min/hire
Onboarding time
The challenge
Northwind grew from 80 to 248 employees in two years. Their HR stack — a combination of BambooHR, Excel, Razorpay XPayroll, and a custom attendance app — couldn't keep up.
Anita Reddy, their Head of People, found herself spending six hours a week reconciling headcount across systems. Onboarding was a half-day exercise. Leave queries flooded the HR Slack channel every Monday.
Worse, an audit in late 2025 turned up 18 employees in payroll who'd already left, and 3 active employees missing from it entirely.
“We rebuilt our entire org chart in SignHR in an afternoon. It's the first time the chart has matched payroll in three years.”
The solution
Northwind chose SignHR as a single source of truth. Migration took an afternoon — SignHR's importer pulled everything from BambooHR and Razorpay XPayroll directly.
The leave policy was rebuilt as code in the policy builder, with carry-forward and probation-aware accruals. Approval workflows replaced the ad-hoc Slack DMs.
Payroll moved from a multi-day reconciliation to a 25-minute, three-step process per cycle. Onboarding became a self-driving checklist that completes itself the moment a new hire signs their offer.
The results
Six months in, Anita's team has gone from 9 weekly hours of reconciliation work to under 2.
Onboarding is now 12 minutes per hire on average, down from 4 hours.
The HR Slack channel went from 60 messages a day to about 5 — most of which are policy clarifications, not status checks.
“I keep waiting for it to break. It hasn't.”