Payroll technology is moving faster now than it has done ever before and some of the capabilities and features available in Employee Central Payroll can really help to ensure that your organisation is fit for the future. It can help you meet your deadlines consistently and with high quality, using end-to-end integration. Timeliness of HR data transactions no longer have to create a squeeze on Payroll calendar, with clear lines of accountability and data ownership. So, what is the key to building a robust business case to change the way you deliver your payroll? Let’s explore what your business might need from a number of different perspectives.
The link to your business strategy – for this, let’s start with the question, will your current payroll set-up enable you achieve your business strategy? If you’re looking to grow through acquisition, is it easily scalable, allowing you to on-board and pay your new workforce seamlessly? If you can confidently answer yes to these questions, then maybe now is not the time to start looking at a business case to change but if you have an inkling that somewhere down the line your payroll could be negatively impacted by your growth plans, then perhaps delving a bit deeper on this could be helpful. Other helpful factors to consider in this area:
- Which industry and geographies are you in or do you want to get into? Moving into new markets and potentially expanding abroad, you’ll ned to take into account the systems and processes you’ll need to run Payroll.
- How integrated is your current system with your HR software, fully, partially, painfully?
- And if you have a digital strategy, have you or do you plan to move to the cloud across your systems infrastructure, to ensure that there is a level of future-proofing and efficiency within your business?
- The employee experience – with five generations now in the workplace, more and more organisations are finding that the employer-employee relationship comes with an ever-broadening range of expectations with many elements of your employee value proposition having a link to payroll, for example:
- Earned Wage Access (EWA) for example where individuals can drawdown the wages they’ve earnt in the month before payday. This is something that many modern payroll systems providers now offer but it's still rare. However, it’s a highly valued offering for employees (especially with the pressures that the cost-of-living crisis is putting on households)
- Another factor is the ability to offer flexible benefits, having a fully integrated system can enable the seamless integration from and to Payroll. This means your organisation can quickly implement new benefits and enhance your employee value proposition in an agile way, keeping up with the latest trends. This can allow you to offer these services to employees in a truly flexible way, not once or twice a year but as and when employees need to access it
- A challenge we often see with growing organisations, is how they maintain best-in-class processes as the organisation grows, particularly through acquisition and with ever -changing compliance requirements. Having a system in an architecture that is built to scale flexibly ensures the organisation is ready to bring on new populations, whilst seamlessly integrating the employee experience. Getting the right Payroll architecture ensures you have a common standard practice based on best-in-class employee experience
- ROI & Benefits – is another key area to investigate when building your business case, looking at in terms of effort (the time and resources required to execute your payroll) and the cost. Areas to deep dive into might be:
- Did you know that 71% of Payroll processing time is spent running payroll, completing reconciliation, audits, controls and data entry? Employee Central Payroll can significantly help I all these areas. Features such as ‘always-on’ payroll give real time results as and when a transaction is entered. This combines with employee and manager self-service in a fully integrated solution means that data is entered and validated at source, integrated in real time and then calculated on the payslip – all without any need for manual intervention. This can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of payroll teams, freeing up time for value-add strategic activities.
- How often do people in your business enter the same data into different systems? Often organisations find that over time payroll processes have evolved and adapted as technology and business processes have changed around it, creating an inefficient way of working. These challenges are often invisible to the senior leaders in an organisation but there is significant cost to the business of humans double entering data or managing integrations that don't work well.
- Total cost of ownership is also another thing to consider. As an example, if you are currently using an on-premise solution, there could be a significant number of overheads associated with the hardware, running costs and associated audits that come with maintaining your existing solution. Moving to Employee Central Payroll in the cloud can mean that you only pay for what you use, you always have access to the latest releases and you can rest assured that the solution is independently audited in-line with best practice in the industry
- Lastly, have you considered how easy is it for your managers to access the reports they need to make business decisions? Payroll is often the most reliable source of data and the biggest cost in your business. So often getting critical insights into Payroll data can be tricky for Managers and Senior Leaders to access, requiring effort and time for reports to be created. This all adds cost and in-efficiency, often leading to inaccurate data and therefore decisions being made without the full picture at hand. Factoring this into business case will likely resonate strongly with Senior Leaders in the organisation helping to further build your case.
Compliance – let’s face it, not many people can get excited about compliance, but in Payroll we know how important it is! It’s also one of the areas where payroll can either shine or create a huge headache for an organisation, depending on how your system is configured. Things to consider are:
- How confident are you that your current payroll processes will be able to quickly flex when legislation changes? And how much more could new payroll technology help ensure that you’re compliant (instead of relying on individuals manually checking data and compliance)?
- What is the potential cost of non-compliance in your business? Sometimes measuring this in a business can be difficult, it’s the future risk of cost rather a figure from the P&L. That said doing everything you can as an organisation to mitigate this future cost, can help not just your P&L but your reputation and very existence as a company. Getting compliance right now and being ready for change in the future is often a central tenant of the case to modernise Payroll
- Do you look forward to getting audited? Probably not, audits themselves can be a time-consuming and costly exercise, draining resource away from business-critical tasks – further pressuring your Payroll deadlines. Having access to the relevant data for auditors, with robust reporting, process controls and built in validation is a huge benefit when this sometimes-dreaded time of year comes around.
Payroll is all too often seen as a back-office task by Senior Leaders. But as outlined above, the implication of thinking about it in isolation could, somewhere down the line, have a negative impact on your employees’ experience or your business’s ability to adapt and grow.So, when looking to build a robust case for changing and investing in your payroll, it might be best to start with the question: is your payroll setup going to help or hinder the delivering of your business strategy?
And, if we at Veritas Prime can help in any way, just reach out to anytime:
Posted by: Veritas Prime
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