HRIS (human resource information system)

An HRIS, or human resource information system, is the software that holds the main record of every employee: start date, job, manager, salary, leave balance, bank account and tax details. Many companies now treat this one record as the starting point for everything else. When the record changes, payroll, benefits, the laptop, software access and the company card all change with it, from the employee's joining day to the day they leave.

Here is how it works in general. HR creates the employee's record when the offer is accepted. The HRIS then sends that record to the other systems. Payroll uses it to pay the right salary, with deductions such as provident fund (PF) and income tax. The IT department receives a request to set up a laptop. The company's identity provider, the system that runs single sign-on (SSO), creates the employee's account in each app, with the access their job needs. When the employee is promoted or moves teams, HR changes the record once, and the salary and the access change with it. When the employee resigns, HR sets a last working day, and every account is switched off on that day. Payroll then works out the final payment, which Indian companies call the full and final settlement.

Why build it this way? Without one root record, each team keeps its own list of employees. Someone who left in March may still be able to open the sales records in June, and the company may still be paying for that person's software. A wrong record can also mean a wrong salary, which the employee notices at once.

Take, for example, a retail chain with 6,000 store staff. Its HRIS and payroll system pays each person from the same record that holds their leave balance and their store.

Consider an employee who resigns from an advertising agency. SaaS management software reads the leaving date from the HRIS, and removes the person from every app the agency pays for, so that no licence is wasted.

Say a company manages all its laptops centrally. Unified endpoint management sets up a new joiner's laptop before the first day, and locks and wipes it on the last day, using the dates in the HRIS.

How is an HRIS different from an applicant tracking system (ATS)? The ATS holds candidates, before they are hired. The HRIS holds employees, from the day they join. In a company's software, the HRIS is the system of record for people, as the ERP is for money and stock.