Congrats on your new HRIS or HRMS software system! The implementation experts have imported as much data as they were able to from your payroll software system, Excel files, and your old HRIS system. Now what? There are still fields in your new system that you can’t electronically import because the data is only contained in files. Well, and I hate to say this, that pretty much means you are going to have to manually input this additional data. Before doing so, it’s important to understand the cost versus the benefit of this manual entry.

I went to school for accounting and cost versus benefit is one of the core accounting principles. When I was performing HRIS software implementations, I found this principal to be useful in this arena as well.

Let me show you how the concept is applied to the manual input of information. In our example, let’s assume we have a 500 employee company who has just implemented a new HRIS application. The new product has a field for education level which would have to be manually input if the HR director decides to do so.

What’s the cost of manually entering data into those fields?

Let’s assume that the data for education for each of the 500 employee records has to be obtained from the employee resume or application contained in their paper file. How much time is it going to take an employee to enter each record? Let’s assume three minutes per record. So if we want the data in the new system, it’s going to take roughly 25 hours to do so. Is it worth that amount of work?

What’s the benefit?

Now that we understand the cost, does the benefit equal or exceed the cost of manually entering this information? Will you need to run reports on this information and how often? Will having the information really save that much time, as opposed to just opening up the employee paper file and looking up the data? How much time will it take going forward to manually keep this data up to date with new employees or as the education levels of your employees change?

I used education in this example because I rarely saw any of my clients decide the benefit of having this specific data was worth the time to input the information. I could have used other examples where the obvious choice would be to manually input the fields needed. Let’s say, for example, that your new system could not import historical data from your old product. In this case, especially if you were losing the old system, the benefit may far outweigh the cost of manually inputting the data.

I found the consideration of cost versus benefit helpful when implementing HRIS and HRMS software applications. I hope this concept will assist you with a tough decision in the future as well.