Payroll services make and break the relationships between companies and their employees. No matter how good the culture or friendly the environment is, nothing sours employee moods like being paid late or less than expected.
Inadequate systems, lack of planning & accountability are often the causes of such problems.
“Most payroll systems are stuck in ‘process mode’ in a corner of the company, often run by a focused team, and almost entirely behind the scenes,” says Sandra Crous, Managing Director at PaySpace.
“It creates several challenges. For example, are we still capturing data, or do you import most of it? That is a lot of extra work for burdened payroll administrators. What if there are changes to payroll legislation? Not incorporating these can cause payment delays, errors, or short-changing employees.”
Payroll helps define employee-employer relationships, and payroll problems damage those relationships.
Traditional and monolithic payroll systems are often at the root of these problems, and companies avoid them when they adopt modern cloud-native payroll service platforms.
Why are cloud-native payroll services better? Here are three examples of payroll features that appeal to employees:
Employee and Manager self-service that are device independent
Employees often need payslips to help verify their financial credibility. A delay in providing payslips can impact their plans, yet many companies process such requests manually. The same applies to overtime, leave, benefits, and advances.
Often, all it requires is to furnish a document, a simple task that distracts payroll professionals from focusing their attention on priorities.
The answer is to provide self-service portals that employees and managers can access through any device. At the leading edge, WhatsApp-based bots like PaySpace’s Pacey let employees access payroll information directly through the chat client.
Cloud-native payroll platforms natively deliver such portals because the concept is fundamental to how such platforms work. They also make it much easier to automate payroll workflows, further reducing demands on payroll teams while giving employees what they need at their convenience.
APIs create magic in a payroll office
Proper integration is essential for a well-oiled and responsive payroll service. Accuracy is the leading benefit: integrated payroll systems assist with accuracy of input such as bonuses, overtime, and any other earnings or deduction.
By importing data from different business systems, integrated payrolls ensure more accurate and timely calculations. At its peak, integration can create continuous payroll, which replaces the mad rush of month-end payroll crunches and saves a tremendous amount of time.
When colleagues at a business realise that the payroll is always accurate, on time and accessible, trust is at the forefront of the employee/employer relationship, contributing to better communication and engagement.
Integration makes employee super-apps possible. It can improve essential employee services into one application, a one-stop interface for all your company needs. Including payroll services is an enormous benefit if integrated into a company’s tools set.
Accurate calculations and compliance
Employees feel the pain of payroll errors. Integrating data from different business applications creates accurate payroll calculations—a natural fit for cloud-native payroll platforms that other payroll systems cannot match.
‘Cloud-washed’ payroll services will simply not be able to provide the integration scale and capacity that cloud-native services offer out of the box.
There is another substantial advantage to using cloud-native payroll systems. ‘Cloud-native’ means single instance and multi-tenant platforms: one application serving numerous users. Services such as Office365, Gmail, and Slack are single-platform and multi-tenant.
This model has a distinct advantage: one update to the system resonates for all users. For example, PaySpace proactively adds payroll legislation changes for different regions, ensuring that PaySpace users always use the latest legal benchmarks when calculating payrolls.
These proactive and free updates save considerable time, improving accuracy and lowering the risk of inaccurate statements or payments.
These three examples are only a sample of what cloud-native payroll platforms deliver naturally, says Crous:
“Cloud-native payroll systems are still relatively new when compared to the decades of traditional legacy systems, but they are already showing why they are much better for employers and employees. They differentiate themselves so much that a traditional [payroll system cannot deliver and scale features as quickly, if at all, and they don’t have the same innovation pipeline that continually adds new improvements.”
Cloud-native platforms are incredibly versatile and powerful, and they are very user-focused. They provide enormous advantages for relationships between employees and their companies.
Self-service portals, extensive integration, and accurate calculations are just a few among a fast-growing list of payroll service advantages that create employee satisfaction and engagement.