Should HR Interface or Integrate Applications?

Spectrum HR has an excellent whitepaper available online discussing the benefits of interfacing vs. integrating various aspects of HRIS. What happens when an HR department is rigidly determined to have as few software vendor relationships as possible? The organization may actually be shooting itself in the foot by choosing a partner that offers an integrated HR system as part of its product offering.


Payroll is obviously a highly specialized field and requires software that makes it possible to effectively manage all aspects of employee compensation from overtime calculations to leave accrual to tax withholding. The state and federal rules for payroll management are constantly changing, so outsourcing this function or hiring a specialist to run an in-house program makes sense. However, payroll software vendors aren’t really the best choice for HRIS. Their products are too narrowly focused and HR simply doesn’t get all the tools needed to manage non-payroll aspects of workforce management. Inevitably, HR must add other third party applications to pick up the slack.

An ERP suite software provider may have a more complex HR offering and the pricing is likely to be attractive as part of a package deal. However, key areas of functionality are still likely to be missing. This leaves HR struggling to develop workarounds that are inefficient and not agile enough to remain compliant with labor laws.

What’s the Answer

The conclusion reached by the authors of the Spectrum paper is that Payroll and ERP vendors simply don’t provide the solutions HR needs for human capital management. The obvious answer is to implement a Best of Breed HRIS product rather than trying to integrate critical HR’s processes with the limited functionality of software that is not designed with HR’s needs in mind. The HRIS can then be interfaced with the Payroll partner and the ERP application as needed to share data.

HRIS Still Doesn’t Have It All

The relationship between HRIS applications and onboarding software is identical (albeit on a smaller scale) to the difference between ERP and HRIS solutions. Onboarding is too often thrown in as an afterthought rather than being designed for compliance, efficiency, and practicality. That’s why Emerald Software continues to offer Best of Breed Universal Onboarding software for our clients to interface seamlessly with their existing HRIS program.