Excel is not really your competitor's competitor. It is Workflow Engine's biggest one. The majority of Pakistani SMEs we talk to are not switching from another HRMS. They are switching from a set of spreadsheets, a WhatsApp group, and whatever the previous HR person built before they left the company.
Why Excel wins by default
Excel is already installed on every computer. Nobody needs approval to open it, nobody needs a login, and it can be shaped into almost anything: a leave tracker, a payroll sheet, an attendance log. That flexibility is exactly why it becomes the default. There is no barrier to starting, which means there is also no barrier to every department building its own version that does not talk to anyone else's.
Where it actually breaks
The cost of Excel shows up gradually. One spreadsheet for leave requests, a second for attendance, a third for payroll, and a fourth someone built for performance reviews last year and nobody has touched since. None of them share data. An employee's leave balance in one sheet can disagree with the number in payroll because someone forgot to update both. When the person who built the original formulas leaves the company, whoever inherits the file usually does not fully understand it either.
There is also no audit trail. If a number changes, there is rarely a record of who changed it or why, which becomes a real problem the moment a compliance question comes up around EOBI or PESSI contributions.
What moving to Workflow Engine actually changes
The switch is not about features Excel lacks. It is about removing the manual reconciliation between sheets that never should have been separate in the first place. Leave, attendance, payroll, and compliance data live in one place, so an approved leave request automatically reflects in the attendance record and the payroll calculation for that cycle, without anyone updating three files by hand.
Approval workflows replace the WhatsApp message asking a manager to approve leave. Self service replaces the email asking HR for a payslip copy. And because everything is tracked in one system, if a number needs checking six months later, there is an actual record instead of a guess.
The real comparison
Excel costs nothing to open and everything to maintain once your team grows past a size where informal tracking works. Workflow Engine's starter plan is PKR 12,000 a month for up to 50 employees, which is generally less than the value of the hours a mid sized team spends reconciling spreadsheets every month, before counting the risk of an error nobody catches until it is expensive.
Book a demo and bring one of your current spreadsheets. We will show you exactly what it looks like as a connected workflow instead.
Adnan Khan
HR Lead, Bitsbuffer
Adnan leads HR operations and business development for Workflow Engine. He writes about Pakistani HR compliance, payroll, and workflow automation from direct operational experience.