8 business KPIs that improve with employment system integrations

Employment system integrations—that is, integrations with HR information systems and payroll systems—typically fall under the purview of product teams, but that doesn’t mean that they are strictly a product concern. In fact, a well executed employment system integration strategy has the potential to affect a myriad of aspects of your organization for the better, including your growth trajectory, opportunities for expansion, and expenses.

In other words, the decision to integrate with employment systems is a business one. As you weigh your options, consider these eight KPIs that employment system integrations often impact:

Growth KPIs

1. New logo acquisitions

Employment system integrations enlarge the field of customers you can work with by enabling instant compatibility with the employment systems they use, allowing you to close more deals with a wider range of organizations.

This is especially true if your strategy entails partnering with a broad-coverage employment system API like Finch that enables connectivity with many systems from a single integration. In turn, your sales team is empowered to pursue segments of the market that would otherwise be uneconomic due to lack of connectivity. With Finch’s 150+ integrations, you can service 88% of U.S. employers—and many international ones—in one fell swoop.

Learn how Green Spaces was able to address 90% of potential customers by expanding its integration coverage with Finch.

With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.

2. Sales cycle length

Increasingly, the availability of employment system integrations is an important purchase criterion. Having integrations in place at the outset of your engagement meets a key expectation of potential customers, which can help fast-track them through the sales pipeline to a signed contract.

On the other hand, if you’re following a bottom-up sales model, you’ll appreciate that employment system integrations enable a seamless data sync process that supports self-serve onboarding and product-led growth. In other words, leads can start using your product without having to speak to a sales rep, bypassing an extended sales pipeline altogether.

See how Mosaic was able to accelerate their sales pipeline and go live with integrations 94% faster than doing it in-house by working with Finch.

3. Average contract value

Many applications realize a boost in ACV when they offer integrations as part of a premium tier of service or product access. Because employment system integrations can save your customers hours of work at onboarding and fuel deluxe features and product enhancements, you can leverage integrations to persuade customers to sign larger deals.

4. Free-to-paid conversion

If your product offers a self-serve motion accompanied by a free trial, data syncing via employment system integrations indicates a lead’s high intent to pay for your product. By granting access to their employment data, they’ve signified that they trust your value proposition and want to see your product drive ROI for their business.

Learn how MainStreet saved $65M+ for small business clients using a self-serve flow powered by Finch.

Expansion KPIs

5. Logo retention

Acquiring new customers is helpful, but keeping them around for the long-term is how you build a sustainable business. Data connectivity via employment system integrations supports retention in multiple ways:

• It makes for stickier customer relationships. Since your product is directly connected to your customers’ source of truth, and they’ve already configured their workflow based on how your product ingests their raw employment data, they’re highly invested.
• By syncing with census data, you can track champions, buyers, and other key stakeholders within a customer organization and proactively reach out when organization changes occur, helping to ensure a continuous relationship.
• If your product drives employee retention, you can measure the impact of your product on individual team and organization-wide retention rates from the time of implementation. That way, when renewals come up, you’re able to concretely demonstrate ROI.

6. Revenue retention

If your product relies on a usage-based business model driven by seats or per-employee-per-month (PEPM) growth, access to customers’ employment data gives you a direct line of sight into the potential size of their contract. It also streamlines the process of expanding usage by giving your customers the ability to track new employees and automate user invites.

Additionally, if your product has multiple buyers across an organization—say, finance and HR—you can leverage your access to real-time organizational structure data to cross-sell your product into other teams.

Cost KPIs

7. Engineering expenses

If you build employment system integrations in-house, the initiative will likely be a drain on your development resources. Assuming that three engineers will work on an integration for three months (or more, if your needs go beyond basic census data), that puts the engineering costs of just your initial build-out in the ballpark of $200,000. Multiply that by the number of integrations you need to adequately cover your customer base plus maintenance costs, and you are looking at a steep, ongoing investment.

Outsourcing employment system integrations to a third-party API like Finch saves you money by eliminating the need for multiple build-outs and drastically reducing the number of hours your engineering team has to dedicate to the project. Our team does the heavy lifting, including maintenance, so your internal talent can focus on your product’s core technology and UX.

Find out how Trainual reduced development costs by 75% by using Finch.

8. Support costs

During onboarding and implementation, customers often require hand-holding—and one of the biggest hurdles they cross is data syncing. That means that your support team needs to be trained in the specific data syncing processes, formats, and idiosyncrasies of each system you integrate with—a monumental and costly training initiative. Even then, it often requires three to four calls with a customer to confirm connectivity. These are costs that don’t scale and can balloon as your customer base expands. Employment system integrations reduce the data syncing process from days to seconds and remove the friction that necessitates hand-holding in the first place, allowing you to save support resources for initiatives that increase customer loyalty.

Learn how Lane Health reduced support costs and eliminated 8-12 hours a month of manual data entry for their customers with Finch.

Accelerating success

Integrating with employment systems isn’t just a slick product enhancement; it’s a strategic business initiative that drives measurable impact across your organization. Much of the ROI, however, depends on prudent execution—namely, partnering with a universal employment system API like Finch that can optimize coverage, performance, and cost efficiencies.

In short, Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll systems for you, so you can optimize the return. Our dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for exceptional usability no matter the source.

Talk to one of our experts today to learn how Finch’s employment integrations can drive business outcomes for you.