How Cloud Solutions Help To Improve The Payroll Process

Getting payroll right isn’t easy. With compliance requirements, employee queries, and looming deadlines, the process of paying employees accurately and on time can easily become an unwelcome burden. Since payroll isn’t ‘customer facing’, it’s easy to see why business owners want (and need) to keep the time and resources dedicated to the process as low as possible. On the other hand, payroll isn’t something you can be complacent about: pay problems quickly snowball, leading to missed deadlines, unhappy employees, and potentially heavy financial penalties.

Fortunately, plenty of technological tools exist to make the payroll process easier – but knowing when, and why, to integrate tech into your existing system means thinking carefully about what you need to achieve. From time and money drains to complex regulatory requirements, if you need ways to overcome payroll problems, it might be time to explore technological solutions…

Cost & Efficiency

Simply put, if payroll is costing too much, causing too many compliance issues, or drawing focus away from your core products and services, you’ll need to make a change. The American Payroll Association suggests that payroll automation can reduce costs and compliance errors in the process by around 80%, but factoring technology into your existing system is about finding balance. While software tools may represent a cost outlay, the cumulative benefits of automation should outweigh that cost. If purchasing payroll tech is still unfeasible, there are other answers: outsourcing payroll to a service provider is a way of accessing the very latest tech tools, along with procedural efficiency and compliance expertise.

Employee Enrollment

Inducting employees onto a payroll can be extremely time-consuming, and the point at which one of the most serious payroll mistakes – employee misclassification – often happens. Tax authorities focus heavily on misclassification, so it’s vital your enrollment procedure is optimized to avoid errors. Implementing automated enrollment programs not only makes the process quicker but can be used to sort large numbers of employees with much more accuracy, ensuring they are assigned the correct tax band – and avoiding future costly classification issues.

Record-Keeping

The payroll process is built on record-keeping – which means not only logging and storing information but being able to access it when necessary. The potential for issues with paper-based payroll is high and includes obvious issues of inefficiency, human error, and simply finding the space to store all the information that your business accumulates. Relevant tech solutions include not just the space-saving advantages of electronic data, but the innovation and efficiency of cloud-based computing, which makes record-keeping faster and more accessible, and removes the need for on-site data storage.

Hiring Staff

The modern payroll skillset requires more than just a talent for numeracy – payroll administrators also need to be communicators, problem solvers, and creative thinkers. If you’re struggling to manage a payroll skill-shortage, technology represents a way of finding the right people: while it won’t replace face-to-face interviews, screening software can help you narrow your pool of potential candidates, and quickly identify those individuals who can enhance your department.

Reporting

Payroll involves a wide variety of reporting obligations to tax authorities. Keeping track of those reports, and submitting them efficiently can be a significant drain on the time and focus of your payroll employees. You can, however, streamline reporting obligations with certain software tools: payroll platforms incorporate automatic reporting and remittance mechanisms to the relevant authorities, reducing the need to keep track of physical documents, easing your administrative burden, and freeing up employee time.

Customer Service

Many payroll departments contend with a high volume of queries from employees seeking information about their payslips, or the payment process itself. Customer service should be a priority for payroll departments, which means training and assigning administrators to handle the various situations that obligation generates. Innovative technologies can remove much of the work from this aspect of the role: Artificial Intelligence chat programs, for example, can handle initial employee queries, screening more complex issues for human admins – who may then, if necessary, set up face-to-face meetings.

Analytic Potential

While your payroll may be ticking over at a satisfactory level of performance, it’s rare that a system operates without some level of inefficiency. The analytic capabilities of payroll software feedback a vast range of data on all aspects of the process – and at a level of detail impossible for a human perspective. If you think your payroll is ‘good’ but could be ‘great’, then the data generated by deep computer analysis may create subsequent opportunities to eliminate those small errors and efficiency drains that would otherwise have been missed – delivering cumulative efficiency and value for your pay system over the long-term.

 

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