Let's do some math. Not the fun kind, but the kind that makes you reconsider how your IT team spends its time.
Every time a new person joins your company, someone on the IT team has to create their account, assign them to the right groups, set up their email, give them the correct licenses, and make sure they can access the tools they need for their job. How long does that take?
If you're being honest, somewhere between 30 minutes and two hours per person. Depends on the role, how well-documented your process is, and how many interruptions happen along the way.
Now multiply that by every hire you make in a year. If you're growing and bringing on 50 new people annually, that's somewhere between 25 and 100 hours of IT time just on account setup. That's one to three full work weeks a year spent clicking through the Entra ID portal.
But the direct time cost is actually the smallest part of the problem.
The costs you're not measuring
Delayed productivity. When a new hire can't access their tools on day one, they sit idle. Or they bother their colleagues for access to shared files. Or they work around the system entirely, which creates its own problems.
A 2023 study by Ivanti found that 40% of employees wait more than a day to get full access to the tools they need when starting a new job. For a knowledge worker making 500,000 SEK a year, each unproductive day costs the company roughly 2,000 SEK. Multiply that across 50 hires and you're looking at 100,000 SEK in wasted productivity. Just from waiting for IT to finish the setup.
Support tickets and interruptions. When onboarding is manual, things get missed. The new hire can log in but can't access the project management tool. They've got a Teams account but aren't in the right channels. Each of these gaps generates a support ticket or a "hey, can you help me with something?" tap on the shoulder.
Those interruptions cost more than the time to resolve them. They break the IT team's focus on other work. Context switching is expensive, and onboarding issues create a steady stream of it during hiring peaks.
Inconsistent access. This is the one that keeps security people up at night. When you're doing onboarding manually, each setup is slightly different. The person who onboarded the marketing team in January used one set of groups. The person who did it in June used a slightly different set, because the documentation wasn't updated, or they couldn't find it, or they just made their best guess.
Over time, you end up with people in the same role having different access levels. Some have too little (they can't do their job efficiently). Some have too much (security risk). Nobody really knows which is which until something goes wrong or an auditor starts asking questions.
Audit pain. Speaking of auditors. When it's time for your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 review, you need to demonstrate that access is granted consistently, according to policy, with proper documentation.
If your onboarding process is "the IT guy follows a wiki page and does it manually," your audit evidence is weak. "Who approved this access?" "Uh, it's just what we always give the marketing team." "Can you show me the approval record?" "Not really."
Audit remediation and the extra documentation effort that comes from weak processes can easily cost a company 50,000 to 100,000 SEK per audit cycle in additional consultant fees and IT time.
The compounding problem
Here's what's insidious about manual onboarding costs. They grow proportionally with your headcount, but the IT team doesn't grow at the same rate.
When you had 50 employees and hired 10 people a year, the manual overhead was manageable. At 200 employees hiring 40 people a year, your IT team is spending a significant chunk of their capacity on repetitive setup tasks. At 400 employees? You're either drowning or you've quietly accepted that onboarding is always going to be messy.
And because the costs are spread across different budgets and teams (IT time, new hire productivity, security incidents, audit expenses), nobody ever totals them up. It's the classic death by a thousand paper cuts.
Let's actually total it up
For a 200-person company hiring 50 people per year, here's a conservative estimate of annual manual onboarding costs:
Cost category | Estimate
- Direct IT time (1 hour per hire at 400 SEK/hr) | 20,000 SEK
- New hire idle time (0.5 days per hire) | 50,000 SEK
- Support tickets and rework (30 min per hire) | 10,000 SEK
- Inconsistent access remediation | 25,000 SEK
- Additional audit documentation effort | 50,000 SEK
- **Total** | **~155,000 SEK/year**
That's a conservative estimate. Some companies will be higher, especially if they have complex onboarding requirements or multiple office locations.
And this doesn't include the intangible costs: IT team frustration, new hire first impressions, and the opportunity cost of IT spending time on manual tasks instead of strategic work.
What fixing it looks like
The fix isn't complicated. It's automation. Specifically:
Define roles and their access requirements once. What does a "Marketing Coordinator" need? What groups, licenses, and app access? Write it down, configure it in your system, and never think about it again (until the role changes).
Connect to your HR data. When HR marks someone as starting, the provisioning runs automatically. Account created, groups assigned, licenses applied, welcome email sent. Zero IT intervention for standard hires.
Handle exceptions with a lightweight request process. Not every new hire fits a standard template. For non-standard access needs, have a simple request and approval flow instead of a verbal "hey can you also give them access to X?"
Log everything. Every access grant should be recorded with who, what, when, and why. Not for bureaucracy's sake, but so that when audit time comes, the evidence is already there.
Measure the improvement. Track time-to-productivity for new hires before and after automation. Track IT time spent on onboarding. Track support tickets related to missing access. The numbers will justify the investment.
The payoff is faster than you think
Most companies that automate onboarding see the ROI within the first quarter. Not because the tool itself is expensive to implement (it shouldn't be), but because the savings on IT time, productivity gains, and reduced audit overhead add up quickly.
And honestly? The biggest win is often the softest one. Your IT team stops dreading Mondays when new hires start. They can focus on work that actually requires their expertise instead of clicking the same buttons for the hundredth time.
If this sounds like your situation, Adcyma is free for up to 25 users. For larger teams, you can start a free 14-day trial. No credit card, no consultants.