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.
So, what is the key to building a robust business case to change the way you deliver your payroll?
1 . Supporting your business strategy - 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 onboard 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 for change. However, 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 different systems and processes you’ll need to run payroll.
- How integrated is your current system with your HR software, fully, partially, painfully?
- If you have a digital strategy, have you or do you plan to move to the cloud, to ensure that there is a level of future-proofing and efficiency within your business?
2. 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. Many elements of your employee value proposition having a link to payroll:
- 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)
- 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. Building the right payroll architecture ensures you have a common standard practice based on best-in-class employee experience.
3. ROI –when building your business case, it is important to look at the time, resources and cost required to execute your payroll..
- Did you know that 71% of processing time is spent running payroll, completing reconciliation, audits, controls and data entry? Employee Central Payroll can significantly help in 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, meaning 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 their time for value-add strategic activities.
- 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 inefficiency, often leading to inaccurate data and decisions being made without the full picture at hand. Factoring this into business case will likely resonate strongly with senior leaders in the organisation.
4. Compliance – let’s face it, not many people can get excited about compliance, but in payroll we know how important it is! It’s an area 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, as 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. 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 Veritas Prime can help in any way, reach out at anytime:
