TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT
Adam Reynolds, chief executive officer of webexpenses, outlines how these tools are making a difference The power of real-time tools for payroll professionals
I t’s easy to forget sometimes what life was like before the arrival of digital technology. How long it could take to collate and compile any kind of payroll information when everything required was stored on a disparate amount of paper documents. Thanks to the speed and efficiency of digital data, today’s finance professionals are able to complete accountancy tasks which would previously have taken days, in a matter of minutes or hours. And as the pace of business life continues to accelerate, we’re rapidly moving to an environment in which we’re able to manage and interact with finance information in real-time – as and when changes happen. Payroll professionals will already be familiar with this general trend, thanks to the UK Government’s recent switch over to a real-time system for handling pay as you earn. But this same process can be seen throughout the finance environment as a new generation of tools enable real- time managing and monitoring. The benefits of this aren’t just improved speed and efficiency; the instant access provided to accurate data opens up fundamentally new ways to work. A prime example of this is the transformative effect real-time tools are having on expenses management. The move from traditional paper-based ways of managing expenses to digital systems has virtually removed any need for paperwork from the process. By using a smartphone app, employees convert
any paper receipts they receive into a digital form. It means that expenses can be updated and processed as and when costs are incurred; there’s no longer a need for a finance team to face a deluge of claims at the end of each month. The benefits aren’t just speed and efficiency, it also provides finance teams with a constant
With a paper-based system, the onus is on finance professionals to try and retrospectively spot this kind of out-of- policy claim; something of a ‘needle in a haystack’ task when large numbers of claims are being processed each month. It’s the inefficiency of this paper- based way of working which has allowed expenses fraud to embed itself so deeply within UK companies, leading to estimated losses of £100 million each year. So the move to real-time monitoring has allowed expenses management to shift away from being a reactive and passive process to become something which is much more active and fully integrated into daily workflow. And this move towards real-time ways of working can be seen taking place throughout the business world as more companies make the switch away from their old manual processes to embrace automated digital systems. For payroll professionals, the pace of these changes can seem daunting. Over the past decade, the traditional image of accountancy as being relatively sedate world of back office number has been swept away. But rather than being a threat, these technological changes are helping to enhance the role of finance and payroll professionals within our organisations. The power of digital tools and the access to accurate real-time data has made it more important than ever to have an effective finance team in place. n
source of accurate and up-to-date information on company cashflow.
...each claim being automatically checked as it’s submitted to make
sure it’s within company policy
Using a paper-based system, any reports are liable to be using figures which are already weeks or months old. With a digital system, reports can be compiled instantly, allowing issues to be spotted before they become resource sapping problems. A particularly effective feature is the ability to monitor costs in real-time with each claim being automatically checked as it’s submitted to make sure it’s within company policy. If it isn’t, or if it triggers any particular limit that has been set, the system can send an on-screen notification to the claimant, along with an alert to the finance team.
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2017 | Issue 28 42
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