Workday, BambooHR, Rippling, ADP and UKG rent the employee record and, usually, a pile of adjacent products. OrangeHRM is GPL-3.0. ERPNext, also GPL-3.0, can hold the same record beside payroll inputs and time, which is useful when the company is already leaving a stack of single-purpose subscriptions.
What moves?
The person, the job, the documents you are allowed to keep, and the history of changes. What does not move is a vendor's benefits marketplace or a prebuilt integration to every US insurer. Those stay rented, or they get built, and building them is a scoped job.
What is the limit?
An HRIS is not a law firm. Owning the record does not answer whether a policy is legal in a state. We deploy the system. Counsel still reads the policy.
When should HR stay rented?
When the company is small, the only user is the founder, and BambooHR is cheaper than a server plus the time to learn it. Own it when the record is entangled with access, payroll inputs, and the rest of the operation.
What do we hand over?
We select the system, deploy it on infrastructure you control, connect it to the tools you keep, and write the runbook so your own team can operate it. Support after handover is optional. The rest of the map is in software you can stop renting; the engagement behind it is open-source business systems.
Name one process that still needs a person. We will tell you what a one-time build takes.
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