The ROI of consolidating your HR tool stack, in numbers you can defend
Every HR lead we talk to knows their HR tool stack costs too much. Almost none of them can say by how much. And that is the whole problem. "We have too many tools" is a feeling. However, your CFO does not sign off the budget on feelings.
Start with what you are actually paying for HR tools
Licence fees are the easy part. Pull every HR-related invoice from the last twelve months. Most 250-person Belgian companies find between eight and twelve, and at least two nobody remembers approving.
Then add the parts that never show up on an invoice:
Hours spent re-entering the same employee into three systems
The connector you paid to build and switched off after four months
Implementation and consultancy fees, amortised over how long you actually used the tool
The reporting that gets rebuilt in Excel every month because no system holds the full picture
Research suggests knowledge workers lose around twelve hours a week chasing data across disconnected systems. Take your HR team's loaded cost per hour and put a number on your share of that. It is rarely small.
The number nobody calculates for their HR stack: cost of staying
Consolidation has an upfront cost. Migration, retraining, a few noisy months. Vendors selling consolidation skip past this. We will not.
But the honest comparison is not "cost of change" against zero. It is cost of change against cost of running the current stack for three more years, including the renewals you will sign because switching felt too hard.
Quantify these for your HR tools:
License spend removed, per year
Admin hours returned, converted to euros
Cycle times: days to onboard, days to close payroll, days to produce a board report
Error rates, especially anything that reaches payroll
Track these too, even though they resist a spreadsheet:
Decisions made on real data instead of a best guess
Employee experience: how many logins to book leave and find a payslip
What your HR team does with the time it gets back
One rule before you build the business case
Do not calculate ROI on a stack you have not mapped. You will underestimate the overlap and overestimate the savings, and someone in the room will catch it.
Map first, cost second, decide third. What goes into the map is in "Blogpost: the five layers of an HR tech stack". Whether the answer is fewer tools or better-connected ones is in "Blogpost: point solutions or one system".
Clarity on what you have. Confidence in what comes next. A Patchwork diagnostic workshop takes one day and ends with your stack mapped and your overspend in numbers. Book your intake here.
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