FEATURE
Jerome spoke to: ● Chris Deeson, UK country lead, KeyPay ● Stuart Hall MA PGMdip MCIPPdip, board director, the CIPP ● Julie Lock, commercial director at Advanced People Management
but there’s a point where it’s extremely difficult to reach a person – and then employees lose out. And if the frustration is great enough – or simple issues spiral into big issues – then employers run the risk of losing employees. It’s all about judgment and balance, but it’s a fine line between efficiency and alienation. SH: No, I don’t – in fact, quite the opposite. I think it gives payroll teams more opportunity to get involved – involved in better communication with employees, creating a better knowledge base for the company, the employee and themselves, and innovative technology, to keep ahead. JL: I don’t feel payroll teams should be losing their personal touch or becoming distanced from employees. The concept of employee self-service is to remove the mundane administrative tasks of data changes, and holiday / absence balance recording and approvals. The change happening is a shift in the responsibility of data input. This gives payroll more time back to spend on employee well-being strategies to support financial and mental well-being, such as pay on demand and flexible working. With the current cost-of- living crisis, how can payroll systems and technologies help individuals understand and better manage their finances? CD: I’d argue this should probably sit outside of payroll systems. Certainly, the technological means of distributing this assistance should come from a separate financial well-being product, as this is a complex area that needs consistent focus. Whether this should be accessed via an application programming interface (API) link from an employee portal in payroll, or within an employee portal in human resource (HR) is arguable. I think the decision on how and whether to make this available to employees is more likely to sit with an HR department than payroll. Therefore, the link should sit within HR software for consistency. SH: Every employee has their own views on how they manage their own money. In the past, it was good enough to just break even at the end of the month. Personal finances are simple, aren’t they? Money in, money out. At the end of the month, if the balance is below zero, you’re in debt; if it’s above zero, you’ve got a bonus! There are
When implementing new systems and data flows,
by exception. The data is then uploaded directly into the payroll solution in a timely manner, removing another opportunity for human error ● remove the time barrier causing the lengthy payroll processing times. Traditional payroll solutions take time to process the payroll, and to calculate and generate large reports and files, such as real time information and Bacs. However, there’s an alternative: payroll professionals can switch to a real-time payroll solution. Real- time payroll solutions process data live; they don’t rely on processes to be ‘run’, such as the payroll calculate, reports and files – everything is in a constant state of readiness. This means processing payroll takes just minutes, not hours or days. This frees more time for quality checking, giving time back to payroll professionals for reviewing variance reports and making amendments prior to the Bacs run, vastly improving the accuracy of a payroll run. Rather than believe everything will work first time, assume it won’t and look for potential errors As employee self-service and chatbots become more popular, do you feel payroll teams are losing their personal touch and basically being distanced from employees? CD: I work in tech, but I’m no longer young – and therein lies my conflict. If there’s simple information I need to find the answer to, and it’s outside office hours, then self-service is fantastic. It saves me time and I don’t miss a personal interaction. Chatbots are exasperating when I have something unusual I want the answer to, or if it’s a specific question to which they can only provide generic responses – especially when they pretend not to be bots and you catch them out. Self-service is good in terms of efficiency,
additional verification checks aren’t always required, so how can payroll professionals deal with human error involved in the original input? Chris Deeson: Data migration is thought of as being the biggest hurdle to switching software. It’s less of an issue than perceived and the reason for this is that you can often take standard extracts from the previous system and move them without touching the data, minimising human error. Using the previous pay period’s full payment submission provides a large amount of data and, critically, the year-to-date figures. It’s not perfect, but it’s a good enough starting point to be the industry standard. Data mapping tools are fantastic – they take time to set up from a software perspective but allow data extracts to be mapped into the new software. Where the mapping has been done, they’ll usually already have ‘learned’ the mapping from previous uploads from the same software. With these types of tools, often the biggest issues now relate to errors in running the payroll before migration rather than migration errors themselves. Stuart Hall: My belief is that you should always err on the side of caution. Rather than believe everything will work first time, assume it won’t and look for potential errors. Do small trial runs and trust your instincts to check the results. Julie Lock: Payroll accuracy is a critical part of a payroll professional’s role, and one they take very seriously. There’s nothing more demotivating than knowing you’re processing a payroll with errors. The two main contributors to payroll errors are: ● missing or inaccurate timesheet / absence data ● lengthy payroll cut-off periods. The solutions to each of these problems are: ● using a T&A solution to automate the capture of time worked, with accurate start and finish times, planned and unplanned absences, removal of buddy clocking time theft, and accurate calculation of gross pay, considering all payment and shift rules. Managers simply manage the data
21
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 81 | June 2022
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker