Important Functions of HRIS (Human Resource Information System)

It’s a very interesting and backbone of any business as it’s the people who build the business and thus should be taken care of in well manner. First let us understand what we actually mean by HRIS and how it is derived. In earlier times it was more often called as HRM (Human Resource Management) where you need to manage the people in all aspects, but as in this new era of technology the HRM is linked with IT (Information Technology) and when performed HRM with the help of Information Technology it gives birth to the new day terminology which is called HRIS. Here we use technology to capture data, organize and manage the captured data. 

Few years back, in order to enable this kind of functionality in your organization, you need to deploy ERP solutions, or integrated systems to manage HR activities but today as this is the era of application and small business software’s which are developed to help a particular set of people, you can have HRIS as standalone applications, integrated and also on cloud network. 

So let’s see what are the key functions of HRIS:

1. Benefiting Administration

2. Payroll Handling

3. Employee Record Handling

4. Recruitment

5. Training

6. Appraisals & Performance Management

7. Attendance Record Management 

8. Grievance Handling

Now we discuss each of these functions in detail and see how HRIS can be helpful towards achieving them.

1. Benefiting Administration: This function deals with the benefit policies of employee in an organization like, perks, special allowances, insurance, profit sharing and retirement benefits. The HRIS helps in keeping track of employees who are taking part in it and are actually eligible for these benefits. 

2. Payroll Handling: This is the foremost function of HRIS as people are there with you for the “Pay” itself and handling the Payroll is in itself a complicated task which are filled with conditions and company policies, so HR managers have to perform this task every month on each individual basis after calculating his leaves, holidays, late hours, overtime and many other aspects which effects his monthly salary credit. The complexity and the nature of Job has also opened a new type of business which says “Payroll Service provider”. These are third party service providers who does the Payroll function for the organization, so in large organization sometimes this function is not managed by HR department. The HRIS system helps in maintaining the attendance and generating the payroll according to it and also in the preparation of pay slips. 

3. Employee Record Handling: This is a simple function; all you need to do is to maintain the records of each employee but it’s very important and a single error can be very harmful for the organization and the individual itself. This function describes about keeping the employee records from his past organization, personal details and details of current company. Here we also need to manage all the documents related to the individual like offer letter, appointment letter, appraisal letter, relieving letter from the past company and many other documents and need to be managed correctly with exact working dates. HRIS helps it by providing a feature like document generation and document management so HR managers can control this activity with higher number of people as well.

4. Recruitment: This is a critical function to perform for HR Department, as, having good Human Resource can take your company to heights and failing to do this can take your company down. So most of the time HR decides to do the Internal Reference Hiring first in which employees are asked to give reference of the people who they know, and companies also pay for the reference,. If they did not able to find out the perfect job match, then they decide to chose from outside by publishing a job opening on their website, newspaper, job sites and other places, or may be paid services for resume access or a contact to third party consultancy company. HRIS system helps in organizing the recruitment activities properly like resume management, interview panel making, selection criteria, number of interview rounds and many other activities which needs to be performed as the recruitment process.

5. Appraisals & Performance Management: This function is not only independent to HR but dependant on other functional departments. It needs score from various other departments and people as well like from Project Managers about the team leaders and team members, Sales Managers, Branch Manager and other people. In other words we can say from all those individuals who are the boss of one or the other in the hierarchy. Collecting these reports and other relevant information like extra-curricular activities & participations, learning reports, are joined together for analysis and comes out with the appraisals, incentives and promotions. HRIS supports these activities in analyzing the reports and works as a decision support system for the HRs. 

6. Attendance Record Management: HRIS is majorly used here in an automated fashion mostly and if not, at least in a semi-automated fashion where HR keeps the record of all the employees’ attendance, leaves- paid or non paid, holidays granted or not granted one and of course timely reporting. Although there are smart machine and system now-a-days which manages attendance with a card swipe or a finger print reader, so in modern world it’s not a core HR function but often at some places, specially in small organizations, it is still a function of HRs and we can say that HRIS include attendance management. 

7. Grievance Handling: Its typical to call this just a HR function because it comes under HR in theory but when we need to handle such things, lot of people can gets involved in this; from lower level staff to VP level key people. Grievance can be of multiple nature, at multiple levels; some can be handled at HR level but some cannot be handled by HR level. So grievance handling is a function of HR Department but not in complete sense. HRIS are not able to provide much help in these cases except keeping a log file of it.

These are the HR functions where most of them can be managed by HRIS, and except “Grievance Handling” which becomes more of the onus of higher management. I would really appreciate your comments and feedback on this. 

And if you want to check and try some of HRIS function, download HR Cube- Our Human Resource Information System.