Why Nonprofits Using ADP Should Automate New Hire Onboarding

We’ve all seen it: a new program coordinator starts Monday, but by Wednesday they’re still waiting for email access. HR thought IT had it handled. IT says they never got the paperwork. Meanwhile, your new hire is sitting at a desk reading the employee handbook for the third time. 

For nonprofits running lean, this isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive. Every day someone doesn’t have what they need is a day they’re not serving your mission. 

The fix isn’t hiring more IT staff. It’s connecting the systems you already have. 

What Manual Onboarding Actually Looks Like 

Here’s how most nonprofits handle a new hire: 

HR enters them into ADP, then emails IT. IT tries to figure out what access they need—usually by guessing based on job title or by sending more emails. Accounts get created one by one: Microsoft 365, the shared drive, maybe the CRM if someone remembers. A week later, the new employee mentions they can’t access the grants folder, and another chain of six emails begins. 

The predictable result: delays, inconsistent permissions, security gaps, and staff frustration. Your IT spends hours on tasks that should take minutes. 

The Alternative: Let ADP Talk to Microsoft 

When you integrate ADP with Microsoft’s identity providers, Active Directory or Entra ID, HR stays in charge of employee data while IT automates everything downstream. 

Here’s what changes: HR enters a new employee in ADP, and the rest happens automatically. Automations built in your Azure environment create their Microsoft accounts, assign them to the right department and security groups, provision their Microsoft 365 license, and set up access to Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and whatever program-specific tools they need. Their manager gets notified. The employee gets a welcome email with login instructions. 

Day one, they’re working. Not waiting. 

What This Looks Like in Practice 

A community health center we worked with had a particularly tangled setup—both on-prem Active Directory and cloud-based Entra ID, with manual processes stitching them together. We automated the connection so new hires flow through without the back-and-forth between HR and IT. 

“We were spending so much time on the back-and-forth of onboarding that it felt like a whole job,” said Stephen Tetreault, the IT Director at Lynn Community Healthcare Center. “Now, when HR enters someone in ADP, I know everything downstream will happen. I’m not chasing tickets or fielding calls from new clinicians who can’t log in. It just works.” 

The bigger win was something we haven’t talked about yet: keeping employee information current. Before automation, when someone got promoted or changed roles, their old title would linger in Teams and Outlook for months (or years). It sounds minor, but it created real confusion. People felt some kind of way about seeing their old title associated with themselves. It wasn’t clear who to contact for what. Now when HR updates someone’s title in ADP, name, or other personal information, it flows through everywhere automatically. 

We saw a different version of this problem at a charter school. Schools have high seasonality—a huge wave of new staff and students every August, all needing access on the same day. Their HR and IT teams used to white-knuckle it through the summer, scrambling to get everyone set up while fielding a constant stream of “I still can’t log in” emails. Automating the ADP-to-Azure pipeline turned that chaos into a manageable process. Everyone had what they needed on day one, without anyone working overtime to make it happen. 

Why This Matters for Nonprofits 

Your IT team is probably small-but-mighty. Maybe it’s one person wearing three hats. They shouldn’t be spending hours manually creating accounts when that time could go toward actually improving your systems. 

You’re handling sensitive data. Client records, donor information, case notes, health data. Manual account creation leads to sloppy permissions—someone gets access to files they shouldn’t, or a terminated employee’s account stays active for months. Azure enforces role-based access and automatically disables accounts when HR marks someone as terminated in ADP. No more ghost accounts showing up in your next audit. 

Funders and cyber insurers are paying attention. They want to see identity governance, access controls, audit logs, and timely deprovisioning. This integration checks those boxes without requiring you to build a compliance program from scratch. 

You can’t afford for onboarding to break when your office manager goes on vacation. If the process lives in someone’s head or their email inbox, you’re one resignation away from chaos. Automation means consistency regardless of who’s in the office. 

Don’t Forget Offboarding 

Data breaches at nonprofits frequently come from accounts that weren’t disabled when someone left. It’s not malice—it’s just that nobody remembered to tell IT, or the ticket got lost. 

With a well-planned integration, when HR marks someone as terminated in ADP, Azure suspends their access automatically. Licenses get reclaimed. Managers get notified. If you’ve set it up, devices can be wiped remotely. No more hoping someone remembered to revoke access. 

The Bottom Line 

Connecting ADP to your identity Azure is one of the highest-impact improvements a small nonprofit can make to their IT operations. It’s not glamorous work, but it eliminates a whole category of problems: the delays, the security gaps, the back-and-forth emails, the audit findings about dormant accounts. 

If onboarding at your organization still runs on PDFs and email chains, it’s worth a conversation about what automation could look like. Contact us at insource@insourceservices.com or 781-235-1490 to learn more today.