More than half of HR professionals (52 percent) report experiencing burnout in their role, citing daily struggles with managing their many responsibilities. This is especially true during busy periods, such as open enrollment and benefits renewal seasons, when HR teams’ workloads are heavily burdened. During the renewal period, managing tedious, manual tasks like collecting carrier invoices, cross-checking plan data, and reconciling discrepancies (a difficult task at any time of year) can become completely overwhelming and are often deprioritized. More than 70 percent of HR professionals’ time is spent on repetitive clerical work, leaving little allowance for employee-centric initiatives.
Many companies develop their own homegrown, manual processes to manage carrier invoice consolidation and reconciliation, which often involve numerous spreadsheets and complex processes to manage benefits billing. While this process may work, it typically requires a significant investment of time from an HR staff member that might otherwise be better utilized on other, more mission-critical tasks. Such processes are not only inefficient but also often come with risks associated with them.
The High Cost of Legacy Processes & Systems
While companies often use manual spreadsheet reconciliation, it is not built for the complexity of benefits billing. These processes become significantly challenged by constant changes within the company, such as those resulting from company acquisitions, substantial changes in employee count, or alterations in organizational structures. With employees regularly coming and going, human error is inevitable when using systems and processes not adaptable at scale. Those managing those processes face days of work performing stressful, time-consuming, and mistake-prone tasks.
Legacy systems and processes often carry costs and risks such as:
- Vulnerability to Organizational Change: Company growth, acquisitions, and internal restructuring can strain manual systems that weren’t built to scale. As headcount fluctuates, these rigid setups require manual adjustment to keep up, creating extra work internally.
- Knowledge Silos: Often, legacy systems are homegrown, configured, and run by a single employee who understands the full reconciliation process. Suppose that person leaves the company or is out for an extended period. In such cases, there is often no one else who knows how to manage billing, thereby putting accuracy and continuity at risk. With turnover rates in HR hovering around 15 percent over the past four years, the likelihood of this disconnect is on the rise.
- Unchecked Errors: Manual calculations and reconciliations leave too much room for overlooking important discrepancies, leading to avoidable recurring overpayments that quietly drain budgets.
- Loss of Coverage: Managing multiple carrier invoices requires meeting multiple payment deadlines. Without a streamlined system or outsourcing, the risk of missed deadlines increases, and those missed deadlines can lead to lapses of coverage or even termination of coverage.
- Strained HR Teams, Strained Workforce: HR is expected to drive workplace well-being, but when their own workload is overwhelming, morale suffers. A process that drains their time and energy every month leaves them with little bandwidth to support employees and company initiatives.
Less Stress, More Strategy: Advanced Benefits Billing
Collaboration with an automated benefits billing platform helps cut through the chaos, eliminating errors and saving HR from the monthly grind of manual reconciliation. Here’s how:
-
Consolidating Invoices to Reduce Administrative Workload
The process of collecting multiple invoices from a wide network of carriers can be time-consuming and tedious, requiring the logging into numerous portals to obtain invoices that arrive in various formats and become available on different timelines each month.
Outsourcing automated invoice collection and consolidation removes the need for an HR staff member to do that stressful work. Outsourced partners provide technology-enabled solutions that centralize all carrier invoices into a single, easy-to-review bill and provide detailed reports that allow HR teams to provide finance and accounting teams with a better understanding of the employee benefits related costs in whatever way they want to see it – by employee, by benefit type, by carrier or by department/division/location. Detailed reports are highly valued by finance teams and not always delivered by the HR team.
-
Eliminating Billing Errors & Reducing Financial Waste
Billing errors are more common than many businesses realize. According to the Government Accountability Office, trillions of dollars have been misallocated due to payment errors over the past two decades. If even large organizations with dedicated resources struggle with accuracy, it’s without question that small businesses managing multiple carriers and locations face a steep challenge.
Along with the challenges of collecting and consolidating carrier invoices and demonstrating benefits, most companies then face the challenge of comparing carrier invoice data with data from their HRIS platform. Understanding the differences between the two is paramount in identifying over- or undercharges. Such audits are always complex for companies and often only done intermittently – if at all. Outsourcing this important function ensures consistency and accuracy, and prevents loss of revenue through overcharges by carriers that can’t be recouped if not detected within a specific period.
-
Technology-Driven Benefits Billing – The Long-Term Impacts on HR Employees
As businesses grow, so does the challenge of managing an increasingly complex employee benefits structure. More locations, more carriers, and more invoices add to HR’s workload, turning billing into a time-consuming, repetitive process. Without the right systems in place, HR teams are left chasing invoices, fixing preventable mistakes, and spending their limited time on tedious administrative work.
Burnout doesn’t generate overnight from short-term stress—it builds over time when HR is expected to do more without the right support. By automating benefits billing, organizations are protecting their HR teams from long-term burnout. Reducing administrative strain enables HR professionals to support a healthy workplace culture, enhance the employee experience, and help their business scale without overexerting its people.
