Will HR and finance ever sit comfortably at the same table?

A strong organization is built through strong leaders, each coming to the table with their unique perspectives, skills, and responsibilities. These years spent working from different points of view, having widely different work experience, and holding differing priorities can also lead to competing interests. Take HR and finance for instance. Sure, one side may be more focused on human capital, and the other more focused on monetary capital. But getting them to break bread together and find common ground will put your organization strides ahead of your competitors.

Related: Embracing change: How the HR role is evolving, and how to adapt

The opposite side of the story is simple enough. A clash between HR and finance portends a nagging and potentially damaging breach in the harmonious existence your organization needs if you are to continue reaching your goals and keeping your leaders engaged toward the good of the organization.

Just how divided are HR & finance?

If there’s one thing HR and finance can agree on, it’s that they disagree on most budget decisions. One of the most obvious examples is the ages-old debate over who should be responsible for benefits. Sure, HR is the front runner here. After all, isn’t the delivery of benefits an employee-facing undertaking and responsibility? But look at it from finance’s perspective. They ask, how can you possibly protect your employer brand and provide the best benefits — and still protect the bottom line?

It’s no easy task. And with their competing interests, it’s no wonder HR and finance can’t always get along. Not only do they come to the table from different angles and with different priorities, they are different animals from the start. Most CFO’s are focused on a numbers driven strategy with a matter-of-fact approach to their thinking, while we see HR leaders approach their strategies with a human-centric perspective around the budgeting table.

The federal government reported in June (the last month full numbers were available) that benefits cost U.S. employers an average of $14.25 per employee per hour. With an estimated 120.1 million U.S. full-time employees in June, averaging 40-hour workweeks, the cost of benefits would be $48.04 billion — per week.

Bringing the family together

To bring the family together, synchronously working towards your organization’s bottom line and your employees’ well-being and engagement, it’s critical that HR and finance meet at the table, even as they disagree over what they each believe to be their claim on company resources and investments.

Over time, we’ve identified three common denominators that many modern finance and HR leaders share:

1. They have a strong vision that their work can be better if it’s automated by revolutionary technology.
2. They are often overwhelmed by the sheer day-to-day complexity of their role; worried about the risk involved in change to improve their processes and systems; and sometimes in the dark about details of new technology that could improve performance.
3. They understand they have differences and despite that, their skills and roles could be greatly enhanced with a platform that centralizes more than just the employee-facing enrollment process (which, after all, is only the beginning of the process). More important, they know they’ll both benefit from a platform that picks up where enrollment platforms leave off — a platform that gathers the entire shared benefit process between HR and finance. They’d have the complete scope and depth of the shared benefits administration process in one tool, for the common good.

Automating accounting, billing, reconciliation, payments, data aggregation, and more can make finance and HR shine. Ideally this platform would:

• Be a shared resource to manage disputes and show the data needed to avoid costly mistakes and reduce manual processes.
• Have optimal dashboards that are easy to use and cut the time needed to make sense of the information being visualized.
• Be able to leverage the best metrics to turn finance and HR into strategic leaders.

Getting finance and HR to partner strategically rather than to disagree tactically will strike the harmony that’s needed for each team to focus on improving the business the way they each are expected to today. Imagine the increased performance that finance and HR could provide for the common good of the company with an automated benefits administration platform that removes the burden of transactional processes by automating your processes and making payments on your behalf. In other words, a benefits platform that leverages both a provider of benefits and financial technology, and a third-party administrator (TPA).

How would they fall behind? The only thing either of them would lose is the daily grind of consolidating billing, conducting benefits reconciliation, auditing multiple systems, and suffering the headaches of plan accounting.

How would they get ahead? The freedom of time to focus on the more strategic elements of your businesses: adding clients and planning for the future.

So, what does the path forward look like?

A benefits administration platform that centralizes the entire benefits administration process into one tool is to help HR make the ROI and employer brand cases to invest in the right technology is a great first step.

Employers spend an average of $483 per employee per year on HR technology. This number might feel like a thorn in your finance department’s side, but it’s also reaping unseen dividends. With the pandemic and social justice issues this year, HR technology has faced new demands and set precedents for HR’s roles and responsibilities. In addition, remote work has placed a new stress on your technologies and your relationships. Not to mention the new challenges to benefits that the pandemic has raised.

Your finance and HR leaders should be collaborating harmoniously, moving the organization forward, focusing on the strategic aspects of a great business. Give them the time they need back with one place to connect all of your benefits data and financial information, automated.

Doug Devlin is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Tabulera. . Tabulera provides a SaaS benefit administration platform that automates and aggregates benefits administration, so you don’t have to. Used by large employers, Association Health Plans and PEOs, Tabulera makes it possible to reconcile all your billing, accounting, and payments services in one place, and see your benefits costs clearly. Headquartered in Pleasanton California, Tabulera has offices in the Ukraine and India. 

Read more:

• How COVID-19 is changing the role of the chief human resources officer
• 7 principles for rethinking human capital
• Employers drop the ball on HR tech investments