Manual provisioning rarely shows up as a line item. There’s no invoice for the half hour an IT technician spends creating an account, or for the new hire who spends their first morning waiting for a password. But the cost is real, and it grows with every person you hire.

Here’s a simple framework to estimate it for your own company.

1. IT time spent on account changes

Count every event that touches a user account: new hires, job changes, transfers, name changes and terminations. Then estimate how long each one takes by hand, including the back-and-forth with HR.

As an example, take a company with 1,000 employees and 15% annual turnover. That’s around 150 hires and 150 terminations a year. Add job changes and you might reach 500 account events. At 30 minutes each, that’s 250 hours of IT time a year spent re-typing data that already exists in UKG.

Swap in your own numbers. Most teams are surprised by the total.

2. New hire productivity lost

When accounts aren’t ready on day one, new employees wait. They can’t sign in, read email, join Teams or open the tools they were hired to use. Multiply the hours lost by the number of hires and their hourly cost, and the figure can easily outweigh the IT time.

3. Security exposure from late terminations

Every account that stays active after an employee leaves is a door left open. This cost is the hardest to estimate, but it’s the one leadership cares about most. A single incident involving a former employee’s account can cost far more than an integration project, before you count the time spent on audit findings.

4. Licenses nobody is using

Accounts that aren’t cleaned up keep their licenses. Microsoft 365 and other per-user SaaS licenses keep billing until someone notices. A quick review often turns up licenses assigned to people who left months ago.

5. Errors and rework

Typing the same data twice creates mistakes: a misspelled name, the wrong department, a missing manager. Each one turns into a help desk ticket, a broken distribution list or an org chart that doesn’t match reality.

Putting it together

Add the five numbers and compare the total with the cost of automation. Connect to AD has flat pricing with unlimited employees and no per-user fees. A one-year license is $6,799 and includes 10 implementation hours with an expert.

In the example above, 250 hours of IT time at a loaded cost of $50 an hour is worth about $12,500 a year. That’s nearly twice the license cost, before counting productivity, security or licenses. The bigger your team, the faster the payback.

See the full breakdown on our Pricing page, or book a demo and we’ll walk through the numbers for your company.