Why 64% of HR leaders spend up to 9 weekly hours on data entry

HR departments are in charge of vital, personal and private employee information. But having employees keep track of that information is stealing valuable hours of work — and introducing errors to company data.

According to a recent survey of more than 1,000 HR professionals by application program interface Finch and research agency Atomik Research, 49% say they leverage seven or more employment systems, ranging from human resource information systems, applicant tracking systems, benefits administration, payroll and time-tracking systems. As a result, 64% of those HR leaders said they spend four to nine hours manually entering data every week. 

"All of these things have slices of what the employee lifecycle is, but they are not often talking to each other or talking to other products," says Ansel Parikh, co-founder of Finch. "Companies are having to jump between them manually, especially as companies get larger." 

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A common example of this is when an employer rolls out a new benefit and wants to enroll their eligible employees. In order to make sure everyone who should be enrolled can be, other key information and data is needed to complete the process, including basic information such as names, ages and addresses, as well as healthcare plan eligibility. The streamlining process is often inefficient, leaving HR teams to fill in the gaps themselves, manually entering employee information. 

"This all has to be updated every time someone new joins, someone leaves, someone moves somewhere or changes their job title," Parikh says. "You're now looking at it every week and having to update the same information in six other systems, creating this long treadmill that you're running on constantly just to maintain the status quo of having this information correct everywhere."

This kind of disjointed strategy is what has led 56% of HR teams to find incorrect or outdated information in employee data at least once a week, according to Finch's data. That leads to 50% of top-level HR execs to admit to communicating sensitive employment data through text message in an effort to correct it, creating additional security risks.

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"There's more than 5,000 different HR and payroll systems in the U.S. alone," Parikh says. "To try and create this situation yourself where any one tool can be built for every administrative need is just not really feasible."

Instead, programs like Finch allow companies to keep their different employment systems as they are, while connecting to each one individually and creating pathways between various virtual locations where the data is stored. That way, an HR leader only has to make a change in a single location and Finch will update it across all systems. 

"As an employer you want to empower HR teams to make decisions that are best for their organization," Parikh says. "The right types of tools will help scale that much more effectively to allow them to do the work that is focused on the people, the programs aligning incentives and make sure everyone is on the same page about how organizations evolve."