Dewx HR Hub: Attendance, Leave, and Payroll Built for Small Teams That Actually Work
Managing people should not require a PhD in spreadsheet formulas or a $15-per-head monthly subscription to software your team will barely use. Yet that is exactly where most small and growing businesses find themselves: juggling attendance in Google Sheets, tracking leave requests over Slack messages, and running payroll through a patchwork of tools that never quite talk to each other.
Dewx HR Hub changes that. As part of the OPS Hub, it brings attendance tracking, leave management, and payroll into the same platform where you already manage your sales pipeline, customer conversations, and scheduling. No extra logins. No extra invoices. No extra complexity.
Let us walk through what HR Hub does, why it matters for SMBs, and how it fits into the broader Dewx ecosystem.
Key Takeaways
- Dewx HR Hub delivers attendance tracking, leave management, and payroll in a single, unified module - no more toggling between disconnected tools or spreadsheets.
- Built specifically for teams of 5 to 150, it strips away the enterprise bloat that makes traditional HR software overwhelming and expensive.
- Leave policies are fully configurable - annual, sick, personal, or any custom type - with built-in approval workflows and real-time balance tracking.
- Payroll runs include pay slip generation and multi-step approvals, giving small teams the same financial rigor that larger organizations rely on.
- The AI assistant Dew can answer HR questions in plain English, so managers spend less time digging through dashboards and more time leading their teams.
The SMB HR Problem Nobody Talks About
There is a dirty secret in the small business world: most companies under 50 employees handle HR with a combination of spreadsheets, email threads, and institutional memory. The office manager "just knows" that Jake has two sick days left. The CEO approves leave requests by replying "sure" to a WhatsApp message. Payroll is a monthly ritual of copy-pasting numbers between three different tabs in a workbook that was originally built by someone who left the company two years ago.
It works - until it does not.
An employee disputes their leave balance. A payroll error goes unnoticed for three months. An attendance discrepancy turns into a he-said-she-said situation with no paper trail. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are Tuesday.
The obvious solution is dedicated HR software. BambooHR, Gusto, Rippling, Bob - the market is full of options. But they come with two problems that hit SMBs particularly hard.
First, cost. Most HR platforms charge between $8 and $15 per user per month. For a 30-person team, that is $240 to $450 per month, or roughly $3,000 to $5,400 per year - on top of whatever you are already paying for your CRM, project management tool, communication platform, and scheduling software. Those numbers add up fast when you are watching every dollar.
Second, complexity. Enterprise HR platforms are built for organizations that have HR departments. They come loaded with features like benefits administration, compliance management for 47 different jurisdictions, and org chart builders that assume you have more than three levels of hierarchy. For a team of 20, this is not empowering. It is paralyzing. You end up paying for a tool that your team actively avoids because it feels like overkill.
Dewx HR Hub was designed with a different assumption: that small teams need simple, reliable HR operations, and they need them inside a platform they are already using every day.
What Dewx HR Hub Actually Does
Attendance Tracking That Runs Itself
At its core, attendance tracking in Dewx is straightforward. Employees clock in and clock out. The system records it. Managers can view daily summaries and generate attendance reports for any time period.
But the details matter. The clock-in and clock-out interface is clean and accessible - no training manual required. Daily summaries give managers an at-a-glance view of who is in, who is out, and who has not clocked in yet. Attendance reports can be filtered by department, date range, or individual employee, making it easy to spot patterns like chronic tardiness or consistent overtime.
What makes this more valuable than a spreadsheet is the automation. There is no manual data entry. There are no formula errors. There is no version of the attendance file that Janet updated but forgot to save to the shared drive. The data is always current, always accurate, and always in one place.
Leave Management With Real Policies
Leave management in Dewx HR Hub goes well beyond a shared calendar with colored blocks.
You start by defining leave policies. Annual leave, sick leave, personal days - each type gets its own allocation rules and accrual settings. Different departments or roles can have different policies if needed. A senior developer might get 20 days of annual leave while a new hire starts with 15. The system tracks it all.
When an employee wants to take time off, they submit a leave request through Dewx. The request flows through a configurable approval workflow. For most small teams, this means it goes straight to their manager. For teams that need a second sign-off - say, from operations or finance - you can add additional approval steps.
Managers see pending requests in their dashboard, along with the team calendar so they can check for conflicts before approving. Once approved, the employee's leave balance updates automatically. At any point, anyone can check their remaining balance without asking HR or digging through a spreadsheet.
This is one of those features that sounds simple but eliminates an astonishing amount of back-and-forth. No more "Hey, how many sick days do I have left?" messages. No more managers manually updating a tracker after approving time off. No more end-of-year surprises when someone realizes they have been over their allocation for months.
Payroll That Small Teams Can Trust
Payroll is where the stakes get highest. Get it wrong, and people notice immediately. Get it wrong repeatedly, and you lose trust - and potentially employees.
Dewx HR Hub handles payroll runs with the seriousness the process deserves. You set up pay structures for your employees, initiate payroll runs on your schedule, and the system generates pay slips for each team member. Before anything is finalized, payroll goes through an approval workflow so that a second set of eyes reviews the numbers.
This is not a replacement for your accounting software or tax filing service. It is the operational layer that sits between "we need to pay people" and "the accountant needs the numbers." It ensures that the data flowing into your financial systems is organized, approved, and auditable.
For small businesses that have been running payroll through a single spreadsheet maintained by one person, this is a meaningful upgrade in both accuracy and accountability.
Employee and Department Management
Before any of the above works, you need a clean employee directory. Dewx HR Hub provides employee profiles where you store essential information: role, department, start date, reporting manager, and contact details. Departments are organized with clear hierarchies, and managers are assigned at the department level.
This structure is not just for show. It powers everything else. Leave approval workflows route to the right manager because the system knows who reports to whom. Attendance reports can be filtered by department because every employee belongs to one. Payroll runs can be scoped to specific groups because the organizational structure is defined.
For teams that have been operating without a formal org structure - and there are more of them than you might think - simply setting this up in Dewx forces a healthy conversation about roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines.
Dew: Your AI-Powered HR Assistant
Here is where Dewx HR Hub pulls ahead of every spreadsheet and most dedicated HR tools.
Dew, the AI assistant built into Dewx, understands your HR data. That means managers and employees can ask questions in plain English and get instant answers.
"How many sick days does Sarah have left?" Dew checks her balance and responds in seconds.
"Who is on leave next week?" Dew pulls the approved leave calendar and gives you a list.
"Show me the attendance report for the engineering team this month." Done.
This is not a gimmick. It is a genuine productivity multiplier. Instead of navigating to the HR module, finding the right report, applying the right filters, and interpreting the results, you ask a question and get an answer. For busy managers who are already wearing four hats, this kind of instant access to HR data is transformative.
And because Dew lives across all of Dewx - not just the HR module - it can connect dots that siloed tools cannot. Need to know if the person you are about to schedule a meeting with is on leave tomorrow? Dew knows, because it sees both your scheduler and your HR data.
Why All-in-One Matters for HR
There is a deeper argument here that goes beyond convenience.
When your HR data lives in the same platform as your CRM, your inbox, your scheduler, and your project management tools, you eliminate an entire category of problems that plague small businesses: data silos.
Consider a simple scenario. A sales rep submits a leave request for next Thursday. In a siloed world, their manager approves it in the HR tool, but nobody updates the shared sales calendar, so a prospect gets scheduled for a demo with someone who will not be there. In Dewx, the leave approval automatically reflects across the platform. The OPS Hub knows. The scheduler knows. The AI knows.
Or consider onboarding. When you add a new employee in Dewx HR Hub, they are not just an HR record. They are a user in your CRM, a participant in your team inbox, a bookable resource in your scheduler. One entry, one source of truth, zero duplication.
This is the promise of an all-in-one platform, and HR is one of the areas where it delivers the most tangible value.
Who Is Dewx HR Hub For?
Dewx HR Hub is built for a specific audience: small and growing teams that need real HR operations without enterprise overhead.
If you have 5 to 150 employees and you are currently managing attendance, leave, or payroll through spreadsheets, email, or chat messages, HR Hub is a direct upgrade. If you are paying for a standalone HR tool and finding that your team only uses 20% of its features, HR Hub gives you that 20% inside a platform that covers the other things you need too.
It is not for organizations that need complex benefits administration, multi-country compliance management, or advanced workforce planning. Those are real needs, and there are real tools built for them. Dewx HR Hub is for the rest of us - the businesses that need the fundamentals done right, done simply, and done affordably.
Getting Started
Dewx HR Hub is available now as part of the Dewx platform. If you are already a Dewx user, you will find it inside the OPS Hub. Set up your departments, add your employees, configure your leave policies, and you are running.
If you are new to Dewx, there has never been a better time to see how an all-in-one platform can simplify your operations. Join the beta and get access to HR Hub along with CRM, unified inbox, AI assistant, scheduling, and everything else Dewx offers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I customize leave policies for different departments or roles?
Yes. Dewx HR Hub lets you create multiple leave policies with different allocations for annual leave, sick leave, personal days, and any custom leave types you define. You can assign different policies to different departments or roles, so your leave structure reflects how your organization actually works.
Does Dewx HR Hub replace my payroll provider or accounting software?
No. HR Hub handles the operational side of payroll - running payroll cycles, generating pay slips, and managing approvals. It is designed to work alongside your existing financial tools by providing clean, approved payroll data that flows into your accounting workflow. Think of it as the layer that ensures accuracy before numbers reach your accountant.
How does the approval workflow work for leave requests?
When an employee submits a leave request, it routes to their direct manager based on the department structure you have set up. Managers can approve or deny requests from their dashboard, with visibility into the team calendar to check for scheduling conflicts. For teams that need additional sign-off, you can configure multi-step approval chains.
Can Dew really answer HR questions accurately?
Dew pulls from your live HR data - leave balances, attendance records, employee profiles, and more. When you ask "How many vacation days does Alex have left?" Dew queries the actual balance in the system and returns the current number. It is not guessing or estimating. It is reading the same data you would see if you opened the HR dashboard yourself.
Stop Overpaying for HR Software You Barely Use
Your team deserves better than spreadsheets, and your budget deserves better than bloated enterprise software. Dewx HR Hub gives you attendance, leave, and payroll in the platform you are already using - simple, affordable, and powered by AI.
Start your free beta today and see what HR operations look like when they just work.