Every payroll system exports data differently. Every retirement provider expects it in their own format. If you work in benefits administration, you know this reality all too well. But have you calculated the true cost of this fragmentation?
The Manual Processing Tax
Consider a typical scenario: Your company uses ADP for payroll and has retirement plans with both Fidelity and TIAA. Each pay period, someone on your team exports data from ADP, reformats it for Fidelity's requirements, then reformats it again for TIAA. They check for errors, fix discrepancies, and submit the files.
This "manual processing tax" adds up quickly. Industry estimates suggest that manual data processing for a mid-sized company can consume 10-20 hours per week of skilled staff time. At fully loaded labor costs, that's $50,000-$100,000 annually—just for data manipulation.
The Rejection Rework Cycle
But labor costs are just the beginning. What happens when a file gets rejected? Maybe a date format was wrong. Maybe a field was mapped incorrectly. Maybe a new employee's data didn't match the provider's validation rules.
Each rejection triggers a rework cycle: identify the error, fix the data, resubmit, and wait for confirmation. Meanwhile, contributions may be delayed, and participants may notice discrepancies in their accounts.
The Compliance Risk Factor
Perhaps the most significant hidden cost is compliance risk. Manual data handling increases the chance of errors that could trigger DOL scrutiny or participant complaints. A single compliance issue can result in correction costs, penalties, and reputational damage that far exceeds any savings from avoiding automation.
A Better Approach
Modern remittance processing platforms eliminate these hidden costs by automating the transformation from any input format to provider-specific outputs. At Todays Pension, we've built our platform specifically to handle the complexity of retirement data, so your team can focus on higher-value work.