Paycom Software, Inc. (NYSE: PAYC) (“Paycom”), a leading provider of comprehensive, cloud-based human capital management software, released updates to its usage management analytics tool, Direct Data Exchange®, based on an updated report from professional services firm EY, estimating the labor and nonlabor costs of common HR tasks.
According to EY, the average cost of manual data entry by an HR professional reached $4.86 per instance in 2025, up from an average of $4.78 in 2023. Additionally, the cost per HR task has continued to rise across all HR categories, including expense management, onboarding, benefits enrollment, time management and more, since the survey was first conducted in 2018.
Paycom uses EY’s data to measure costs for manual data entry and HR tasks in Direct Data Exchange. Direct Data Exchange provides an overview of how employees use the self-service side of Paycom’s software, highlighting the savings companies achieve through employee usage and adoption of automated HR processes.
“EY’s latest report denotes a widening gap between the costs of manual processes and the advantages of automation,” said Shane Hadlock, chief client and technology officer at Paycom. “Paycom’s full-solution automation helps our clients bridge this gap, reduce costs and drive business growth.”
With EY’s inclusion of new HR tasks in its 2025 study, Direct Data Exchange can now account for the potential cost savings of Paycom’s new command-driven AI engine, IWant™. IWant offers an easy and automated way to find employee information, eliminating the need to navigate through the software. Without IWant, HR or managers searching for information about their employees results in an estimated labor cost of $11.75 per instance, primarily due to the time required to locate the correct information.
EY’s cost estimates vary for each manual task, reaching as high as $23.27 per instance of manually obtaining information to compare benefit plans. The report indicates that labor costs continue to account for nearly all the total costs associated with manual HR tasks, suggesting that automating these tasks could lead to significant financial savings.
Direct Data Exchange helped identify $5 million in savings for The Kraft Group, parent company of the New England Patriots, through its use of Paycom. The client credits its smooth and superior user experience to Paycom’s comprehensive automation.
“Data is everything. With Paycom’s full-solution automation, we’re on top of cost controls and efficiencies, and that drives the return on our investment,” said the senior vice president of operations at The Kraft Group.
EY routinely updates its report by conducting additional surveys and applying inflation factors to its data. The HR task with the largest increase in estimated cost since EY’s 2023 report was manual payroll creation, which rose by $5.73 to a total of $20.83 per instance. When EY factored in manual payroll tasks, the report’s overall average cost per data entry increased from $4.86 to $5.68, up from $5.35 in 2023.
Paycom’s industry-first payroll tool, Beti®, automates the process. It self-starts each pay period by pulling live data, identifying errors and then guiding employees to resolve them before submission, ensuring accuracy every payday. This tool reduced labor costs for payroll processing by 90% and saved HR and accounting teams over 2,600 hours annually.*
For more information on Direct Data Exchange and EY’s study, view the infographic: The True Cost of Manual HR Processes.
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