Risks of Inaccurate HR Data

Almost everything HR delivers reaches an employee through a form or process: getting a new hire onboarded, paying a substitute, moving someone to a new position, processing a leave, or updating a pay rate. Each of these is a service an employee depends on, and each one runs on a process that has to be completely accurate.

HRIS systems store final data

An HRIS is built to store the personnel record once it exists. The work that produces that record runs somewhere else, across HR, payroll, finance, and benefits, on systems that were bought separately and mostly don’t connect.

These systems are interconnected in practice but rarely connect in software, and ownership of any given process ends up split across HR, IT, and Finance. One payroll manager summed this up as “our HR and payroll systems aren’t really communicating.” When the systems can’t route a process between them, the routing becomes more manual, often online, and usually reliant on one person. For example, someone enters the new hire into the HRIS, then enters the same person into payroll, and then alerts IT of the new hire’s start date.

Where accuracy breaks down

Seemingly minor data errors have a big impact on district employees and the district overall. For example, a substitute may not be paid on time if the paperwork is delayed in transit between school sites and the district office, or a new hire’s first paycheck might be wrong because two different rates were entered in the two different systems. An HR leader from a large district shared that they were paying an employee for a year and a half after they left the district, and when it was caught, HR was responsible for recovering those funds.

Most districts have strong checks and balances to ensure that these issues get caught before they become problems. However, during high volume times such as back to school, most HR teams are over capacity, and the likelihood of errors can increase if districts are relying on manual, doubly-entered data into multiple systems for multiple HR processes.

What changes when the process is connected

The accuracy most often breaks down in the manual handoff, whether email, data entry, spreadsheets, or disconnected systems. When a personnel action, an onboarding packet, or a pay change is digitized and carried forward to the systems that need it, the re-entry that introduces error goes away, and the process completes the same way every time.

This doesn’t mean replacing the HRIS or ERP, because those systems provide essential services. However, it means closing the gaps between them, so the process that delivers a service to an employee doesn’t depend on a person keying the same information into three systems and hoping all three still agree at the end.