COMPLIANCE
The changing face of payroll
Danny Rice, product manager, Workday, discusses how technology has changed payroll processes, and what could potentially be in store for the future P ayroll, by its very nature, is a “The continued need for downtime and set
adjustments, meaning potential delays waiting for payment. Even as technology started to evolve away from mainframes to window-based solutions, there were still many challenges which persisted and drove the need for strict deadlines. Separate solutions for human capital management functions, time tracking, absence management, recruiting, etc., meant various interfaces feeding into payroll, and time needed to, not only load data, but also reconcile it before key points in the payroll cycle. Reporting across these environments is challenging and plays into the need for deadlines to provide sufficient time to complete tasks. For me, this foundation has impacted many of our perceptions of how payroll processing is approached regarding deadlines. It’s also potentially restricted the way we embrace the benefits of new technology since those mainframe days. The continued need for downtime and set dates for entering and / or correcting data
deadline driven function, from the management of data being passed in for processing, to the critical outputs needed to pay employees. I started my career in payroll working on a mainframe system, where deadlines controlled the whole user experience: l the time the system was up in the morning l the downtime at lunch time for backups to be taken l the nightly cut off. And this was before the weekly and monthly pay cycle deadlines came in to play. What was hindering payroll? The mainframe technology infrastructure meant we had very strict timeframes in all aspects of how we could process, report and calculate the payroll cycle. The impact of this meant payroll remained locked as a very transactional process, focussed on only getting employees paid.
dates for entering and / or correcting data has set a very rigid approach and
need to control as payrollers”
This was further seen with the high dependency on paper, particularly with timesheet-based workers and the need to enter data in very tight timeframes. That increased the risk for mistakes, while also leaving no time to undertake any other tasks during this period. Where mistakes were made, the infrastructure model provided potentially one supplementary pay run on a fixed date to make pay
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2023 | Issue 90 24
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