The Hidden Hours Tax: How Much Time CEOs and HR Managers Lose Each Year Without an HRIS

The first weeks of January are when leadership teams feel time most sharply.

New goals, new headcount plans, new priorities—and the same operational friction that quietly ate last year’s calendar shows up again: payroll questions, onboarding delays, PTO confusion, benefits changes, compliance forms, “who reports to who” requests, missing employee data, and the constant back-and-forth that happens when information lives in spreadsheets, email threads, and half-updated documents.

Most companies think of this as “HR busywork.” But for US tech leaders, it’s more useful to name it for what it really is:

A recurring hours tax paid by CEOs, HR managers, and people leaders—every single year—when there isn’t a real system of record (HRIS) running the basics.

This post pulls together research-based benchmarks and turns them into annual time-loss estimates you can use in planning conversations (CEO ↔ HR ↔ Finance) at the start of 2026.

What the research says about time lost to manual HR work

No single study captures every company type perfectly (startup vs. scale-up vs. enterprise), and “without an HRIS” can range from “pure spreadsheets” to “a payroll tool plus manual everything else.” But multiple credible sources converge on the same theme: manual people operations consumes meaningful leadership time.

1) Owners/CEOs in smaller companies lose days—not minutes—to HR administration.
A study of 289 US small businesses (10–99 employees) found that 45% of owners spend roughly one day a week or more on administrative HR issues. It also found that 35% of owners/managers at businesses operating 10 years or fewer spend 6–10 hours per week, rising to 37% for firms with 20–49 employees.

2) HR leaders report losing about a month per year to manual work.
Paychex reports that, according to its Pulse of HR Survey, HR leaders spend four full weeks per year on manual tasks.

3) “Manager admin time” is enormous—and HR processes are a major contributor.
ServiceNow’s research report on managers (500+ employee companies) found that managers spend 2 days per week on administrative tasks outside their core job function.
In a separate ServiceNow press release about automation, the company reported business leaders spending 16 hours per week on manual administrative tasks, and noted that HR was among the least automated functions (with a specific figure given for automation of HR delivery of employee services).

4) Payroll + HR time for small businesses is frequently measured in hundreds of hours per year.
OnPay’s small business finance and HR report states that small businesses spend just over 18 hours per month on payroll, and adds that at 18 hours per month, small businesses spend about the same amount of time on HR.

5) Manual HR tasks create repeated “micro-drains” for HR and managers.
EY research summarized by Paycom estimates costs for routine manual HR tasks like searching for employee information, verifying timecards, recording tax form information, and other common admin activities—signals that these tasks happen frequently enough to measure per instance.

Converting research into annual hours lost (CEO + HR manager)

Below are conservative, research-anchored estimates of how many hours per year get consumed when HR work is largely manual (i.e., no HRIS as the system of record, limited self-service, fragmented tools).

A) CEOs / founders / owner-operators (common in startups and smaller tech firms)

Benchmark 1: “One day a week” on HR admin
If a CEO/owner spends ~1 day/week on HR admin, that’s roughly:

• 8 hours/week × 52 weeks = 416 hours/year

That’s more than 10 full 40-hour workweeks of CEO time annually—spent on HR administration, not strategy, customers, fundraising, product, or hiring the next critical role.

Benchmark 2: “6–10 hours per week” on HR admin
Using the study range:

• 6 hours/week × 52 = 312 hours/year
• 10 hours/week × 52 = 520 hours/year

So a realistic research-backed band for many smaller organizations is ~300–520 CEO/owner hours per year consumed by HR administration when systems are immature.

Benchmark 3: Payroll + HR time combined (often handled by leadership in smaller firms)
OnPay reports:

• Payroll: ~18 hours/month → 216 hours/year
• HR: ~18 hours/month → 216 hours/year
• Combined: 432 hours/year

That 432-hour number is striking because it lines up closely with the “one day a week” finding (416 hours/year) from the Oasis/Paychex study.

Bottom line for CEOs: In many US small-to-mid tech companies without a true HRIS, you’re often looking at ~400+ hours/year of leadership time absorbed by HR + payroll administration (and it can be higher depending on hiring volume and compliance complexity).

B) HR managers / HR leaders

Paychex reports HR leaders spending four full weeks per year on manual tasks.

To translate that into hours, you need a workweek assumption. A common baseline is 40 hours/week:

• 4 weeks × 40 hours/week = ~160 hours/year

That’s a full month of HR capacity burned on manual workflows—before you even account for peaks like open enrollment, end-of-year reporting, hiring surges, or rapid scaling.

And this is a leadership problem, not just an HR problem: when HR is busy pushing paper, the company gets less of what it actually needs from HR—org design, retention strategy, manager enablement, performance calibration, employee relations, and talent planning.

A useful way to interpret the 160-hour figure:
It’s best viewed as a floor for many organizations that rely heavily on manual processes. In practice, manual work tends to expand with complexity: multi-state hiring, benefit plan changes, more managers, more contractors, more compliance needs, more onboarding, more internal movement.

C) “Manager time” as the multiplier (where the real explosion happens)

Even if your CEO isn’t personally doing HR admin and your HR manager is strong, a company without a real HR system often shifts the burden onto managers: approvals, information lookups, timesheet correction loops, onboarding coordination, repeated status updates, and the “where is that file” tax.

ServiceNow’s manager study (500+ employee companies) found managers spending 2 days per week on administrative tasks outside their core job function.

Two days a week is enormous in annual terms:

• 16 hours/week × 52 weeks = 832 hours/year per manager

Not all of those hours are HR-related, and you shouldn’t treat 832 as “HRIS savings.” But it does show how quickly admin overhead can dominate managerial capacity—and HR workflows (onboarding, employee services, forms, approvals) are explicitly part of that administrative ecosystem.

This is where the “no HRIS” issue becomes a company-wide drag rather than an HR department inconvenience: the burden spreads.

Why “no HRIS” creates so much time loss (especially in January)

When companies run without a true HR system of record, time loss usually doesn’t come from one dramatic failure. It comes from repeat friction.

The most common patterns:

Information retrieval becomes a job.
Someone always needs something: start dates, manager history, compensation changes, work location, benefit eligibility, PTO balance logic, policy acknowledgements, equipment assignments, emergency contacts, role history, visa notes, or simply “what’s the right version of this.” Without a centralized system, every answer is a mini project.

Manual data entry and re-entry multiplies.
The same employee data gets keyed into payroll, benefits portals, spreadsheets, onboarding checklists, and IT tickets. EY’s research summary shows these routine tasks are common enough to measure individually, including manager/HR time spent searching for employee information and verifying timecards.

Approvals and handoffs become slow, informal, and inconsistent.
“Did you approve this PTO?”
“Who owns the onboarding checklist?”
“Did we collect the right forms?”
“Is this policy signed?”
Without a workflow backbone, these questions live in DMs and email—and leadership ends up being the routing layer.

January amplifies everything.
The New Year start means role changes, comp changes, benefits changes, policy refreshes, and hiring plans. When your HR operations are manual, January turns into a backlog generator.

A practical set of annual time-loss ranges you can use in planning

If you want a simple, defensible way to frame this at the start of 2026:

• CEO / founder time lost without an HRIS (common SMB/startup reality):
  ~300–520 hours/year on administrative HR issues (research-based range), with multiple sources clustering around ~400+ hours/year when you include payroll + HR administration.
• HR manager / HR leader time lost without an HRIS:
  ~160 hours/year (four full workweeks) spent on manual tasks, with the real number often increasing as the company scales and complexity rises.
• Manager time as the hidden multiplier:
  Research in larger companies shows admin work can consume ~2 days/week for managers, which is ~832 hours/year—not purely HR, but strongly influenced by how efficient (or fragmented) internal support processes are, including onboarding and employee services.

The takeaway for January 2026 leadership conversations

If you’re a CEO or HR leader planning the year, it helps to treat “no HRIS” the same way you’d treat “no CRM” or “no ticketing system”:

Not as a tooling preference, but as a measurable capacity leak.

When you add up the research-backed ranges, it’s entirely plausible that a company without an HRIS is losing:

• hundreds of CEO hours per year, and
• a month of HR capacity per year,
  before you even count the manager multiplier that shows up as slower hiring, slower onboarding, slower approvals, and slower reporting.

If you want, I can tailor this into a version aimed specifically at tech CEOs (more strategy/ROI framing) or specifically at HR managers (more operations framing), while keeping it research-driven and still avoiding any URLs in the body text.