Anna Burgess Yang

First impressions matter—which makes your user onboarding experience critical. A smooth onboarding process gets your customers up and running quickly and helps them realize value faster. Automated user onboarding is the fastest, most efficient way to create an unparalleled user experience.

With automation, you can free up resources both on the customer’s end and internally, onboarding customers with almost no manual effort. It also enhances the overall user experience since your customers can self-serve during onboarding. 

However, onboarding can be challenging in the employment sector, since your product needs to import the data held in the employer’s HRIS or payroll platform. Employee information like job titles, employment status, pay statements, or demographic data needs to be securely transferred before your customers can begin using your product. Without direct access to the employer’s system of record, moving this data to your platform requires costly SFTP setups or cumbersome manual work.

Rather than relying on a lot of back-and-forth with your customer, HRIS and payroll integrations enable you to automate onboarding by securely transferring information from their source of truth — without a lot of manual intervention. 

What is user onboarding automation?

Broadly, user onboarding automation streamlines the process of bringing customers onto a new platform with minimal manual effort. In the employment space, that means importing required employee data automatically from the employer’s source of truth.

Manual onboarding requires a lot of effort of both your team and your customers. All of the relevant employee data—whether that’s census data or individual pay statements—has to be manually imported to your platform. At best, that requires configuring a custom SFTP connection or downloading files from the HRIS or payroll system and uploading them to your platform; at worst, it requires your customer to manually add each of their employees one by one.

By contrast, automated user onboarding is much faster and easier. The use cases are broad, but the core functionality connects an application to the source of truth for employee data, whether it’s an HRIS or payroll database. Once connected, data seamlessly transfers between the two systems almost instantly. Plus, the systems are able to continually communicate, meaning data is updated in your system as it’s updated in the HRIS or payroll system.

5 Benefits of automated user onboarding

Whether your customers are SMBs or large companies, automated onboarding provides a better customer experience. 

1) Improves data quality 

Manual onboarding opens the door to human error. Your customers provide files that must be mapped and imported into your system. Customers may struggle to get files with the correct fields in the correct format. Additionally, manually exported and imported files are always point-in-time and may not reflect the current workforce in the system of record. 

Automated onboarding connects two systems using predefined rules and mapping. Customers can be assured that their data syncs are accurate. In regulated industries, this also ensures all steps for compliance are handled correctly.

Automated onboarding also sets the stage for ongoing integration between systems — which is what your customers need and expect. In fact, 84% of HR professionals say integration is “extremely important” for any tool added to their tech stack. 

2) Saves customers time

With automated onboarding, customers won’t spend time creating files or otherwise importing their employee data from one system to another. They won’t be forced to manually enter employee data if they don’t have the resources or technical expertise to create files.

This reduces the time spent onboarding and also saves time as customers continue using the product. The integration used during onboarding keeps HRIS or payroll data synced between the two systems, automatically adding new employees, de-provisioning employees as they leave, and updating information based on changes to salary, role, and other employee data. 

3) More secure

If your customers have to transfer files for manual onboarding, they risk exposing sensitive employee data. Someone internally may email the files rather than share them securely or download them to a directory that doesn’t meet internal protocols. To transfer files on an ongoing basis, they would need to set up an SFTP connection, which needs to be monitored and managed.

Automated user onboarding securely collects your customers’ credentials to connect their systems. Customer-permissioned access lets users stay in control of what data is shared through the integration. 

4) Delivers value faster

Whether manual onboarding takes days or weeks, it delays your customers’ use of your product. Some initial excitement can wear off, and it takes longer for customers to realize value — both as a company and for their employees. 

Human Interest sees integrations as a competitive differentiator. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to improve our value offering,” says Drew Obston, Manager of Product Operations. “With integrations, we’re able to go above and beyond and say, ‘You don’t have to upload payroll data. You don’t have to be provisioning someone on our team to log in to your payroll.’”

Automated onboarding takes minutes and allows your customers to focus their efforts on configuring and integrating your product into their processes. 

5) Scalable for your organization

If you’re relying on manually onboarding your customers, you need employees to work with them. Your employees may import files on behalf of customers, assist with data mapping, or make ongoing updates to keep data current. 

Manual processes will always be limited by employee bandwidth. Automated user onboarding, on the other hand, has no limits. You can onboard more customers without compromising the onboarding experience. You can focus your resources on relationship management or customer support rather than customer onboarding. 

Examples of automated user onboarding

HRIS and payroll integrations can serve a wide variety of industries, including 401(k) and retirement administrators, employee benefits solutions, insurance, HR technology, fintech, and more. 

Here are a few examples of how automation can streamline onboarding.

401(k) and retirement administrators 

With HRIS and payroll integrations, 401(k) administrators can pull employee information like employment status, start date, and date of birth directly from the employers’ system to automatically verify employees’ eligibility. The eligible employees can then be automatically enrolled in the plan, pursuant to SECURE Act 2.0, with the choice to opt out. Even better, these integrations provide evergreen access to the employer’s payroll system, so new employees can automatically be enrolled once they’ve met the sponsor’s eligibility requirements. 

Use Case: 401(k) provider Saveday uses automated user onboarding to let its customers set up plans in 15 minutes or less. Customers grant access to their payroll systems within minutes, eliminating the need for the Saveday team to manually download files and validate data. 

Employer-sponsored benefits providers

Integrations allow employers to import data for all existing employees so they can enroll in employer-sponsored benefits like ICHRAs, Earned Wage Access, and Health Payment Accounts. The provider can automatically import data for each employee, like individual pay statements, company contributions, pre- and post-tax deductions, and employment status to immediately identify eligible employees, enroll them in benefits, and manage payroll deductions on a recurring basis. 

Use Case: Exhale provides a suite of financial wellness benefits to hourly employees. By integrating with employers’ payroll systems, Exhale is able to enroll employees in benefits up to 2 weeks faster because the company doesn’t need to wait until the next pay cycle to view employees’ pay statement data.

Employee engagement and learning management systems

To effectively train employees and reward them for their efforts, engagement and learning management tools need to have a record of each employee and relevant census data like their hire date, job title, tenure, and more. Integrating with the employer’s HRIS allows these platforms to automatically create accounts for each employee and enroll them in rewards or training programs that are relevant to their specific role. As employees join or leave the company, they can automatically be enrolled or deprovisioned.

Use Case: Trainual uses HRIS and payroll integrations to instantly onboard and offboard employees as necessary, without asking customers to update their user data. That automation is critical for a platform that prides itself on scaling with its customers.

Fintech solutions

B2B fintech solutions rely on current employee data for headcount cost analysis, compensation management, or equity management. With HRIS and payroll integrations, you can securely pull in company, department, job title, and payroll data to enable pay and operational insights. Integrations keep employee data updated so your customers can see analysis and pull reports in real time.

Use Case: Mosaic has built a next-gen financial reporting and forecasting system that relies on seamless data integration from a company’s HR and payroll data. With this information, Mosaic provides detailed insights into employee costs so organizations can strategically plan their headcount. 

How to automate user onboarding

Some companies, recognizing the need for automated user onboarding and ongoing syncs between HRIS and payroll platforms, build their own integrations. For customers, this certainly improves the experience by removing the manual work on their end and keeping data up-to-date. 

However, building integrations comes with its own challenges. With so many HRIS and payroll platforms on the market, companies are faced with two paths: expend resources building a significant number of integrations, or limit your potential customers by only building a few integrations.

No matter the number of integrations you build, you will need developers to work with the APIs of different platforms. Even though integrations improve your end-user experience, building and testing them takes resources away from your core product.

Unified APIs allow companies to launch hundreds of integrations at once. As a single, standardized way to connect systems, unified APIs enable developers to work through a single interface. Your developers don’t have to work through the complexities and variations between each HRIS or payroll platform’s APIs. 

Finch provides secure and comprehensive two-way integrations with over 200 HRIS and payroll systems in the US, covering 88% of employers. 

With Finch, your end user’s experience is seamless and relies on customer-permissioned access to connect their systems to your product. 

With Finch’s unified APIs, you can automate user onboarding and rely on verified, real-time data to keep the systems in sync. 

Empower your customers from the beginning

The best user onboarding is forgettable: it is so easy that it takes almost no time or effort. Manual onboarding and ongoing updates cannot meet customer expectations, so companies need to rely on integrations. Efficient and automated user onboarding builds trust and serves as a prelude to your ongoing partnership. 

Finch’s powerful unified APIs allow companies in HR tech, benefits, insurance, and related industries to access the largest network of HRIS and payroll systems. 

Learn how Finch can benefit your organization by scheduling a call. You can also sign up to try Finch for free.