Feature topic – Payroll: inhouse v as a service
which include those relating to holidays and sickness absence cover, are also better documented, but the implementation of a tried, tested, and actionable business continuity plan is unlikely. Another plus is that some, limited use of employee self-service applications to undertake activities, such as viewing payslips and referring to frequently asked questions, has become more commonplace. This means query volumes are kept at manageable levels outside of peak times, although they can still be significant. Reporting, meanwhile, is starting to become more mature, consistent, and strategic in nature, with payroll data becoming more closely integrated with other HR and business information. Level 3: High maturity When payroll maturity is high, the function can adopt a more strategic role and its focus moves to identifying and undertaking continual improvement activities and enabling better cost-effectiveness. Not only are payroll runs more often error-free, but consistent root cause analysis is used to explain why any issues
are occurring, while helping to identify and resolve any unforeseen or unexpected problems at the same time. Payroll employees stay ahead of the game on compliance by keeping their legislative and regulatory knowledge up- to-date and undertaking risk management assessments. This means the vast majority of compliance risks are known about, accounted for, and mitigated using state- of-the-art payroll software. ...focus moves to identifying and undertaking continual improvement activities and enabling better cost-effectiveness. In addition, high levels of confidence and clarity exist with regard to staff roles and responsibilities and the processes they own, both within the payroll department
and on a cross-functional basis. As a result, the focus is on ensuring ongoing process improvement, something that is made easier by the fact that they are all fully documented and include effective, underlying workflows. Just as important, a comprehensive and actionable business continuity plan, which is updated and tested regularly, has also been put in place to enable the organisation to respond successfully to any unexpected crises. Meanwhile, because of the high adoption of mobile self-service tools, which enable employees to undertake activities such as accessing payslips and frequently asked questions and selecting appropriate benefits, the number of workforce queries has dropped significantly. As a result, payroll and HR teams are able to spend less time answering them and more time undertaking value-add tasks. Finally, payroll applications have been tightly integrated with the organisation’s core HR and finance systems, creating a single source of data, and enabling the advanced automation of reporting and other analytics-based activities to support strategic decision-making. n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 72 | July / August 2021
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