A four-step guide to getting more from your payroll.
Changing your payroll priorities
While payroll is essential for the smooth running of any business, it is often ignored until things go wrong. Even where it’s clear there are inefficiencies, there’s often a feeling that the difficulties of making any change would outweigh results. Accepting the status quo is no longer an option. New complexities and a wave of regulatory changes brought by the pandemic have only served to expose existing payroll weaknesses further. So, it is time to move payroll up the priority list, to optimise operations and reduce risk in the new working environment. Check below to see how to take a new look at pay and overcome the barriers to change.
Step 1: Remove weaknesses, build strengths
Wherever you are on your journey to optimise payroll, it is important to identify where the potential problems lie. What can — and often will — go wrong in the four stages of the payroll cycle, is shown in the diagram.
Common issues include low quality data; difficulties keeping up with regulatory changes; and over-reliance on manual processes. A modern payroll system overcomes these challenges by simplifying payroll workloads, giving complete visibility over the whole process and reducing non-compliance. As a result, your teams have more time to focus on value-add tasks.
Step 2: Decide where payroll lives
What’s best, to manage payroll in-house, to outsource or a blended approach? That depends on what your payroll team can manage, which is largely decided by the skills and resources you have in-house. In-house offers a degree of control but in contrast outsourcing can save time and money — through reduced non-compliance, mitigating risk and greater agility.
Step 3: Operate payroll like your business
A global business needs a single global payroll platform, albeit combined with the flexibility to adapt locally as required. Unfortunately, most businesses work the other way around: trying to fuse together a patchwork of local solutions running in different countries. The inevitable problems they report include late payments, low data quality, and compromised services. To check how efficient your systems are look at the level of duplication between your payroll systems.
Step 4: Let teams work where they add most value
The amount of time spent on day-to-day payroll queries means there’s little time to focus on more valuable tasks such as:
- Collecting and analysing data — using AI and machine learning to enhance real-time reporting for better workforce management
- Reducing offline work — digitising paper-based tasks saves time and money and increases payroll efficiency
- Doing more with payroll — by integrating systems such as expenses and HR, saving your team time and effort
- Seeing what’s happening in real-time — with a single, global view of payroll data to support more strategic decision-making
Automation is key to making sure payroll runs smoothly each month, with the fewest possible errors.
Optimisation is the first phase in payroll transformation. Discover how to combine this with complete visibility and agility to unlock the power of pay.
Read the ADP eBook — ‘Payroll - Neglect or Nurture?’
Sources
1 The Potential of Payroll: Global Payroll Survey, ADP, 2021
2 Total Economic Impact™ of ADP Global Payroll Study, Forrester Consulting, 2020
A four-step guide to getting more from your payroll.
Changing your payroll priorities
While payroll is essential for the smooth running of any business, it is often ignored until things go wrong. Even where it’s clear there are inefficiencies, there’s often a feeling that the difficulties of making any change would outweigh results. Accepting the status quo is no longer an option. New complexities and a wave of regulatory changes brought by the pandemic have only served to expose existing payroll weaknesses further. So, it is time to move payroll up the priority list, to optimise operations and reduce risk in the new working environment. Check below to see how to take a new look at pay and overcome the barriers to change.
Step 1: Remove weaknesses, build strengths
Wherever you are on your journey to optimise payroll, it is important to identify where the potential problems lie. What can — and often will — go wrong in the four stages of the payroll cycle, is shown in the diagram.
Common issues include low quality data; difficulties keeping up with regulatory changes; and over-reliance on manual processes. A modern payroll system overcomes these challenges by simplifying payroll workloads, giving complete visibility over the whole process and reducing non-compliance. As a result, your teams have more time to focus on value-add tasks.
Step 2: Decide where payroll lives
What’s best, to manage payroll in-house, to outsource or a blended approach? That depends on what your payroll team can manage, which is largely decided by the skills and resources you have in-house. In-house offers a degree of control but in contrast outsourcing can save time and money — through reduced non-compliance, mitigating risk and greater agility.
Step 3: Operate payroll like your business
A global business needs a single global payroll platform, albeit combined with the flexibility to adapt locally as required. Unfortunately, most businesses work the other way around: trying to fuse together a patchwork of local solutions running in different countries. The inevitable problems they report include late payments, low data quality, and compromised services. To check how efficient your systems are look at the level of duplication between your payroll systems.
Step 4: Let teams work where they add most value
The amount of time spent on day-to-day payroll queries means there’s little time to focus on more valuable tasks such as:
- Collecting and analysing data — using AI and machine learning to enhance real-time reporting for better workforce management
- Reducing offline work — digitising paper-based tasks saves time and money and increases payroll efficiency
- Doing more with payroll — by integrating systems such as expenses and HR, saving your team time and effort
- Seeing what’s happening in real-time — with a single, global view of payroll data to support more strategic decision-making
Automation is key to making sure payroll runs smoothly each month, with the fewest possible errors.
Optimisation is the first phase in payroll transformation. Discover how to combine this with complete visibility and agility to unlock the power of pay.
Read the ADP eBook — ‘Payroll - Neglect or Nurture?’
Sources
1 The Potential of Payroll: Global Payroll Survey, ADP, 2021
2 Total Economic Impact™ of ADP Global Payroll Study, Forrester Consulting, 2020