Payroll has always been a discipline which has prided itself on accuracy and excellence of execution. Paying employees accurately and on time is the cornerstone of any organisation’s rewards structure and failure to get it right can have catastrophic knock-on effects not only on a company’s reputation but also for the financial and mental wellbeing of their people.
To achieve the speed and accuracy desired in the function, many organisations are now beginning to take a closer look at the systems which they rely upon for each and every pay cycle. It’s an unfortunate truth that outdated or legacy systems can sometimes lead to organisations running their payroll weeks ahead of the check date, meaning there’s little room for flexibility or to account for any errors which may occur in the period in between.
National Payroll Week is our time to come together and give our thanks to the hard working people who make payroll work each and every month. One of the best ways to show your appreciation is by ensuring that your payroll teams have access to the tools they need to achieve accuracy and excellence with every pay cycle.
We wanted to take the time to look at the emerging importance of real time payroll and explore why we believe it represents a necessary evolution of payroll in the near future.
What is real time payroll?
Real time information (or RTI) in payroll, refers to the ability to report pay information to HMRC essentially simultaneously with their people being paid. All organisations report to HMRC electronically ahead of making payments to their employees and the advance nature of this reporting can depend on a variety of factors, not least of all the age and capability of their payroll solutions.
Why is real time payroll important?
Real time payroll is a boon for organisations in that it allows them to report their pay information to HMRC and run their pay cycle right at the eleventh hour. This affords businesses and their payroll teams a greater degree of flexibility when it comes to allowing for changes which need to be made to their payroll reporting ahead of time.
Organisations who are languishing with older solutions may find that they have little scope to make adjustments to their payroll and hit a specific payment date. If a system is so sluggish that it requires a business to run their payroll weeks in advance, then any changes which occur in the period in between cannot be accounted for. This can mean that extra payments such as overtime allowance, a salary change or pension contributions accrued will incur a severe lag time in reaching the pockets of your people.
In light of the cost of living crisis, it is likely that many employees will be looking to pick up overtime and work extra hours, simply to accommodate for spiralling costs in utilities and groceries. These extra hours may represent the difference between employees being able to pay their bills or not, meaning that they need access to this extra money in a timely fashion. Delays incurred by an outdated solution can mean that your people receive the money too late to help. This can lead to mounting physical and mental strain, compounded by heightened financial stress.
One of the key challenges outdated systems represent for payroll is the potential for inefficiencies to plague the working week and distract from business operations. A lack of automation, inefficient data siloes and the inability to deal with compliance requirements in an agile and timely fashion. Fundamentally, this means that rather than their skillsets being used to help guide and shape ongoing strategy, payroll professionals are stuck in a groundhog day of the same basic and menial tasks.
Unfortunately, the importance of payroll to a business and the consequences of getting it wrong has created a paradox wherein payroll has lagged behind in terms of digital investment. Organisations fixate on the idea of bungling an integration of a new system or solution to the point where it blinds them to the ROI potential offered by digital transformation. Real-time payroll should be the kickstart for organisations to revolutionise and modernise their payroll solutions.
How can Advanced Payroll help?
We created Advanced Payroll specifically to help tackle challenges facing payroll professionals day in and day out. We’ve taken on board the experiences of people working in the field in order to craft a solution which can free payroll teams from the burden of admin heavy tasks and allow them to leverage their skills in more meaningful ways.
We also appreciate that the transformation of your payroll processes is never a thing to be taken lightly, which is why we’re here to support you every step of the way and make sure you can hit the ground running with your new solution.
With Advanced Payroll, you get:
A choice- Advanced Payroll can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise, whichever suits your business more.
Real time calculations – instantaneous gross to net calculations for up to 10,000 employees in just 20 seconds..
Super speed processing – Calculate BACs in under 20 minutes
Pay on-demand – employees can draw down earned pay as they need it
Reporting – building your own reports has never been easier
Employee on-line access – data, documents and payslips at your people’s fingertips. Roughly 439,000 payslips are currently processed by Advanced Payroll each month.
Advanced Payroll offers you the scalability and flexibility you need to completely transform the way in which you run payroll, capable of working effortlessly across multiple sites and pay grades. Whether operating as a standalone system or integrated with our Time and Attendance, HR and Access Control solutions to form a comprehensive Workforce Management suite, Advanced Payroll helps you process payrolls efficiently.
Our solution gives you the comprehensive reporting, GDPR auto-processing and audit trail capability you need to have peace of mind that your payroll is being run accurately and in a compliant fashion month in and month out.
This National Payroll Week, why not take the time to look at your systems and the way you run payroll. Do your solutions offer the flexibility you need to run payroll in real time and account for any changes that occur within the pay cycle? We believe that Real time payroll represents the future of pay and that the systems you rely on for each and every pay cycle should be working in lockstep with you to help you achieve this.
