Real People, Real Stories: HR Head builds an Investment Declaration app

In India financial year is April to March, so typically by March, everyone tries to submit their Investment Declarations for the calculation of TDS or Tax Deducted at Source.

As the HR head, one of my duties is to collect this Investment Declaration from the employees, collate it and forward it to the Finance & Legal team for further approvals and finally reflect the same in final salary computations and form 16.

For the same reason, March used to become a tedious month for me. I had to go after every employee in our organization, asking them to share the investment declaration along with supporting documents. There was a lot of running around and too many paper and email trails to fetch the data.

So, this year I decided to automate and digitize the entire process and speed things up for me giving me more time to focus on other tasks. 

The popular choice would be Google forms. But that didn’t support my complete requirement. As I needed approval from Finance and collate only the approved documents in a repository. I went on to DronaHQ’s low code platform and a couple of hours for 2 days and my application was ready. 

Coming from a non-tech background, at first, getting to the solution seemed difficult but once I went on the platform and saw how easy it was, within minutes I saw my logic coming into action. It required no more running around and unnecessary following up with the employees. No searching through the emails looking for final documents. 

On the app-builder screen, I added controls to collect the investment amounts under concerned categories and another control that will allow the employees to upload documents that support the declaration they make. I added a workflow that would notify me every time any employee submitted his or her details via the app and then the data goes to the financial accounts team for final approvals. 

After realising how simple this was, I went ahead to take on slightly complex HR problems. So far I have made a Leave Application Master, an Attendance and Timesheet Tracker and an app for the employees to calculate their TDS. All I needed was a well-defined problem statement. Once the outcome I needed was clear in my head, the app making was a matter of minutes.

Low Code is as easy as it promises to be. I really appreciate the user-friendly interface of the Studio platform, it is proof of the fact that anyone with a non-tech background can make apps. As far as HR is concerned, there are so many HR centric functions that I can think of that can be digitized in a similar manner while incorporating the company’s unique policies and a platform like this seems like a no-brainer solution to go about.