Why HR and payroll software needs cross-category integrations to survive

For many SaaS companies, product integrations are helpful—but not essential.

Their competitors might not offer product integrations; their customers might not demand them; and their prospects might not treat them as a key criteria when evaluating vendors.

HR and payroll software companies don’t fall into this category.

They have to provide product integrations. Even more, they have to provide them across multiple categories of software. 

You can read on to learn why.

Different integration categories support separate and uniquely-critical product functionality 

There are several categories of integrations that have a significant impact on an HR and payroll provider’s UX—and neglecting any can come at a steep cost. 

Let’s highlight two categories of integrations that illustrate this point: HRIS and accounting.

When payroll and HR software providers offer additional product lines, they’ll likely need to offer integrations with customers’ HRIS solutions to drive quick and seamless adoption with them.

More specifically, using these HRIS integrations, the payroll and HR software provider can auto-provision users to and de-provision users from their additional product based on the associated activities in the integrated HRIS.

Accounting integrations also support several essential use cases.

For instance, once an HR and payroll provider integrates with customers’ accounting systems, they can build the following workflow: Once a provider processes payroll for a customer and creates a payroll journal entry, the entry will get added to the customer’s ERP system’s general ledger automatically, which can include key information (e.g., payment date) necessary to reconcile the expense.

Related: 3 key integration use cases for HR and payroll software providers

Market-leading HR and payroll providers offer several categories of integrations

Upstart and mid-sized HR and payroll solutions are at a significant disadvantage if they can’t keep pace with the market leading platforms’ integration offerings.

Take BambooHR, for example. 

The market leading HR software offers nearly 150 product integrations that span countless categories, from accounting solutions to business communication platforms to applicant tracking systems.

If payroll and HR software can’t offer the integrations BambooHR provides in key categories, they’ll be all the more likely to lose sales and customers to BambooHR—along with similar solutions that offer expansive integrations.

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Cross-category integrations provide endless marketing opportunities

Each customer-facing integration that an HR and payroll company adds is an opportunity to co-market with the other company across channels.

Take the HR software startup, Gifted.co—a gifting solution for clients and employees—as an example.  

By integrating with Remote, a prominent HRIS solution, Gifted.co has been able to:

• Partner on a joint press release

• Have Remote promote the integration on their social channels (which have a significant following) 

• Establish a presence on Remote’s help center, with an article that walks users through setting up their integration with the HRIS solution. 

It’s worth remembering: All of these activities are with a single partner. 

If gifted.co can perform similar activities with popular software solutions across all of the integration categories they support (which includes marketing and sales), they have countless  opportunities to drive additional awareness. 

Related: Examples of impactful payroll integrations

Add all of the cross-category integrations your HR and payroll software needs with Merge

Merge, the leading, multi-category unified API solution, lets you add more than 200 integrations to your platform across HRIS, accounting, ticketing, CRM, and more through a single integration build.

Merge also offers:

• Integration Observability features that let your customer-facing teams diagnose, troubleshoot, and address integration issues
• Advanced features to help you sync custom data, such as Field Mapping and Remote Data‍
• Enterprise-grade security features to help your team keep customers’ data secure and follow the principle of data minimization (e.g., Common Model Scopes)

Learn why leading HR software providers like Remote and BambooHR trust Merge to power their product integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.