Chartered accountant Lucca

Chartered Accountant Lucca – Complete HRIS for SMEs and Mid-Caps#

Hayot Expertise, a chartered accounting firm in Paris, helps its clients deploy and optimize Lucca, the reference HRIS (Human Resources Information System) for French SMEs and mid-caps. Whether you want to digitize your HR processes, secure your payroll, or simplify leave and expense management, Lucca is the modular solution that adapts to your needs — and its native integration with Silae makes it the ideal choice for companies that outsource their payroll to an accounting firm.

Founded in 2002, Lucca is a French software company that publishes a modular HRIS now used by over 4,000 companies and 300,000 users. Unlike large international ERPs, Lucca was designed specifically for the realities of French labor law and collective agreements, making it particularly well-suited for SMEs and mid-caps (20 to 2,000 employees).

The philosophy: one functionality per need, each working independently or in combination. You can start with leave management, then progressively add expense reports processing, digital employee records, and payroll preparation.

Payroll Management Connected to Silae#

A major advantage is a native, bidirectional integration with Silae, the expert payroll solution. Leave balances, validated expense reports, overtime hours — all payroll variables flow automatically to Silae, with no manual re-entry.

Leave & Absence Management#

Automated legal and conventional counters, real-time balances, manager validation workflows. Validated absences flow directly to the accounting firm's payroll without manual intervention.

Comprehensive Time Tracking#

Track working hours, badging, fixed-day packages, and project timelines. Overtime is automatically valued and securely pushed to the payroll execution team.

Digital Employee File (Core HR)#

Centralize contracts, amendments, and employee documents in a secure digital safe. The digital onboarding flow features customizable checklists, while offboarding is structured to avoid oversights upon staff departures.

Employee Appraisals & Training#

Easily manage mandatory annual appraisals, individual development plans, a corporate training catalogue, and legal requirements tracking to guarantee HR compliance and career development.

Paperless Expense Reports#

Revolutionize reimbursements with OCR photo capture of receipts and automated manager validation workflows. Reimbursements are natively sent to the local payroll to be included in the monthly cycle.

Advanced Team Scheduling#

Simplify shift planning for your teams, oversee last-minute replacement management, track legal overtime alerts, and execute direct data exports for smooth premium calculations (such as night shifts or Sundays).

This is the key advantage for companies supported by Hayot Expertise:

1. Variable collection in Lucca: throughout the month, employees and managers enter absences, expense reports, overtime
2. Automatic transfer to Silae: at payroll close, Lucca pushes all variables to Silae. No re-entry, no risk of omission
3. Payroll production by Hayot Expertise: our social team receives variables in Silae, controls consistency, calculates pay slips
4. Return to Lucca: finalized pay slips available in each employee's Lucca safe; counters updated
5. DSN transmission: Hayot Expertise sends the Social Nominative Declaration via Silae, securing your URSSAF declarations

• Phase 1 – Audit and initial setup: configure Lucca in compliance with your collective agreement and legal obligations
• Phase 2 – Team training: train managers and HR teams on Lucca modules
• Phase 3 – Lucca-Silae integration: configure the data flow and run end-to-end tests before the first payroll run
• Phase 4 – Monthly monitoring: control variables, validate pay slips, secure DSN transmission

Does the HRIS really integrate with Silae? Yes, it offers a robust native bidirectional integration. Key pay variables flow automatically into Silae without manual re-entry, limiting any risk of errors.

Is this system suitable for a 30-employee SME? Yes, typically deployed from about 20 employees. You can start with priority features (such as leave tracking and expense reports) and expand as your company grows.

What's the difference between Lucca and PayFit? PayFit is an all-in-one solution for startups wanting to manage payroll in-house. Lucca is a modular HRIS that integrates with Silae for companies preferring to outsource payroll to an accounting firm.

Is Lucca GDPR compliant? Yes, hosted in France on OVH servers, ISO 27001 certified, fully GDPR compliant.

• Silae – The reference payroll software used by Hayot Expertise
• PayFit – The all-in-one HRIS for startups managing payroll in-house
• Deel – International payroll for teams in 150+ countries

HR administration in France is governed by constraints that generic international platforms rarely handle well. Statutory working time, paid-leave accrual counters, RTT days, the forfait jours arrangement, sector collective agreements such as Syntec, Metallurgy, Construction or Commerce, mandatory professional interviews and the BDESE all carry precise legal rules. Lucca was built around these realities from the start, and it keeps the underlying rules updated in real time. That native fit is the main reason the platform suits French SMEs and mid-caps rather than being adapted from a foreign HR model.

The modular logic reinforces this advantage. Each functionality can run on its own or alongside the others, so you pay only for what you actually use. A typical adoption path begins with leave management, then adds expense reports, the digital employee record, and finally payroll preparation. This progressive approach avoids the disruption of a large all-at-once rollout and gives your teams time to learn each module before the next one is switched on.

Beyond automated counters, the day-to-day workflow is what removes friction. An employee submits a leave request in a few clicks from the mobile app or the web interface. The manager receives a notification and approves or declines it. Counters update in real time, and once a request is validated it flows automatically to the accounting firm for payroll calculation. The result is the end of spreadsheet-based leave tracking, miscounted balances, and endless back-and-forth with staff about their remaining days. Both legal and collective-agreement counters are supported, along with accrual rules and live balances, so the figures employees see match the figures used to produce their pay.

For companies subject to time-tracking obligations, whether under the European directive, a fixed-hours package, or annual modulation, the platform offers structured oversight rather than informal records. Time can be entered by project or by activity, automatic alerts fire when statutory limits are approached or exceeded, and the data exports cleanly to payroll so overtime is valued correctly. An HR dashboard surfaces the key indicators, including the absenteeism rate and overtime volume, which gives management a factual basis for decisions instead of anecdotal impressions.

The digital employee file centralizes all personnel administration in one secure, professional-grade record. Employment contracts, amendments, and administrative documents sit inside a digital safe. Digital onboarding runs through a customizable checklist that can cover equipment handover, IT access, and team introductions, while a structured offboarding flow prevents the oversights that often accompany departures. Access rights and permissions are managed centrally, and an internal directory with a dynamic org chart keeps the organization legible as it grows. For the HR function, this means the end of paper files, scattered spreadsheets, and documents nobody can find. For the accounting firm, it means reliable, up-to-date social information whenever payroll requires it.

The platform digitizes the more demanding parts of talent management. Annual and professional interviews, the latter legally required every two years, use forms that can be tailored to your collective agreement. Individual development plans and SMART objectives give structure to career conversations, while the training side covers the catalogue, enrolments, and the tracking of CPF hours. Employees can also record their development wishes. This matters legally as well as operationally: failure to conduct the mandatory professional interviews can trigger a compulsory CPF top-up, so a system that documents and schedules them reduces a concrete financial exposure.

Expense handling is one of the most time-consuming tasks for employees and managers alike, and the workflow here is designed to compress it to seconds. The employee photographs a receipt with a smartphone, the built-in OCR extracts the amount, date, merchant, and VAT, and the report is created and submitted for approval almost immediately. The manager validates from a mobile device, the accounting team pulls the data smoothly into the accounting tool, and the reimbursement folds automatically into the payroll cycle. Lost reports, unreadable receipts, and slow reimbursements give way to faster repayment and analytical accounting that is largely automated.

For businesses that depend on tightly coordinated rosters, including retail, hospitality, healthcare, and logistics, scheduling is a core need rather than a convenience. The platform supports weekly or monthly planning by team, manages replacements and last-minute absences, and raises alerts when maximum working durations are at risk of being breached. The schedule then feeds payroll so that premiums for night work, Sundays, and public holidays are calculated correctly rather than reconstructed after the fact.

The integration with Silae is the decisive advantage for companies supported by Hayot Expertise, and it is worth understanding the sequence concretely. Throughout the month, employees and managers record absences, expense reports, and overtime in one central place, each validated according to the workflows you have configured. At the close of the payroll period, the HRIS pushes every variable to Silae automatically, with no re-entry, no email, and no risk of omission. Our social team then receives the variables in Silae, checks consistency by comparing against the previous month and verifying the collective agreement, calculates the pay slips, and submits them for your approval. Once payroll is finalized, the slips appear in each employee's digital safe and the counter balances update. Finally, Hayot Expertise transmits the Social Nominative Declaration through Silae, securing your filings with URSSAF, pension funds, and supplementary health insurers. This removes the habitual friction between a client's HR tool and the firm's payroll software, friction that is frequently the source of costly errors.

The right tool depends on size and on whether payroll stays in-house. Lucca paired with Silae fits SMEs and mid-caps of roughly 50 to 2,000 employees that want a complete, flexible HRIS while keeping an accounting firm to produce payroll. It offers a full modular HRIS, a specialized leave module, a specialized expense module, and a native bidirectional Silae link, all with very solid French HR compliance. PayFit, by contrast, is an all-in-one product better suited to startups and smaller companies that want to internalize payroll with a highly intuitive interface, but it does not connect to Silae. Silae on its own is payroll software for any size of company and is ideal precisely when payroll is outsourced, though it does not provide leave or expense modules. The practical reading is simple: choose the combination that matches both your headcount and your decision to keep or outsource payroll production.

The commercial model is a SaaS subscription billed by module and by employee, which keeps the entry cost low and scales with usage. Discounts apply from larger headcounts, and Hayot Expertise can help negotiate the contract and propose a bundled offer that includes accounting-firm support. On timing, a complete deployment covering configuration, testing, and training typically runs over several weeks depending on the number of modules and the complexity of your collective agreement, with our team handling the setup so the first payroll run holds no surprises.

Data protection is a recurring concern, and the platform is built to address it. It is hosted in France on OVH servers, holds ISO 27001 certification, and meets GDPR obligations, so your employees' personal data does not leave European territory. Every employee also has a personal portal, available on web and mobile, where they can view leave balances, pay slips, pending expense reports, HR documents, and their schedule. The system supports all French collective agreements, with the specific rules around leave accrual, RTT, the forfait jours, and contractual bonuses configured and kept current, while Hayot Expertise verifies that configuration during deployment.