TECHNOLOGY
“Let’s face it, not many people can get excited about compliance, but in payroll, we know how important it is”
l earned wage access (EWA), where individuals can drawdown the wages they’ve earnt in the month before payday. This is something many modern payroll systems providers now offer but it’s still rare within businesses. However, it’s a highly valued offering for employees (especially with the pressures of the cost- of-living crisis) l the ability to offer flexible benefits – having a fully integrated system can enable seamless integration to and from 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 services to employees in a truly flexible way, not once or twice a year, but as and when employees need to access it l maintaining best-in-class processes as the organisation grows, particularly through acquisition and with ever- changing compliance requirements. Having a system in an architecture built to scale flexibly ensures the organisation is ready to bring on new populations, while seamlessly integrating the employee experience. Getting the right payroll architecture ensures you have a common standard practice based on best-in-class employee experience. Return on interest and benefits This is another key area to investigate when building your business case, looking in terms of effort (the time and resources required to execute your payroll) and the cost. Areas to deep dive into might be: l 71% of payroll processing time is spent running payroll, reconciliation, audits, controls and data entry. Modern payroll systems can significantly help you in all these areas. Features such as ‘always- on’ payroll give real time results as soon as a transaction is entered. When this combines with employee and manager self-service in a fully integrated solution, it means 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, helping you meet your deadlines and freeing up time for value-add strategic activities l how often do people in your business enter the same data into different systems? l 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’s significant cost to the business of humans double entering data or managing integrations that don’t work well l the total cost of ownership is also another thing to consider. As an example, if you’re currently using an on-premise solution, there could be a significant number of overheads associated with the hardware, running costs and associated audits which come with maintaining your existing solution. Moving to a cloud-based payroll can mean you only pay for what you use, always have access to the latest releases and you can be confident the solution is independently audited in line with best practice in the industry l have you considered how easy it is 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 being known. Factoring this into your business case will likely resonate strongly with senior leaders in the organisation.
for an organisation, depending on how your system is configured. Questions for consideration could include: l 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 you’re compliant (instead of relying on individuals manually checking data and compliance)? l what’s 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 than a figure from the profit and loss (P&L). Doing everything you can as an organisation to mitigate this future cost can help not just your P&L, but also your reputation and very existence as a company. Getting compliance right now and being ready for change in the future is often a central tenet of the case to modernise payroll l 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 and 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 dreaded time of year comes around. Payroll is all too often seen as a back-office task by senior leaders. But as outlined here, the implications of considering 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? n And, if we at Veritas Prime can help in any way, just reach out to us anytime: Email: ned.mcevoy@veritasprime.com LinkedIn: http://ow.ly/U8mF50NKqQi Website: http://ow.ly/l5iN50NKqTw.
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
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 90 | May 2023
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