Payroll at the heart of employee engagement

payroll and hr integration
By Anthony Wolny | 23rd July 2020 | 14 min read

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to many businesses re-evaluating their key functions, creating an ideal opportunity for payroll professionals to transform and improve their processes.

For those looking to enhance their payroll offering, you must stop viewing it as a standalone function that has little interaction with the rest of the business.

Instead, utilise advancements in technology and consider integrating it with your HR function and strategy as it can not only streamline processes but also play a huge role in employee engagement.

The benefits of Payroll and HR integration

The two disciplines may historically be separate, but they are critically linked and ultimately can’t function without each other.

By integrating the two, you’re able to eliminate a lot of the process-heavy tasks and utilise one database, enabling the following benefits:

1) Increased productivity: By linking your payroll and HR systems, you create a direct link to your employee database, providing a smoother data flow.

The practical implications of this unification mean you no longer have to hunt for information to complete a payroll run.

It also eliminates the risk of human errors such as potential typos when manually copying information from one system to another.

2) Enhanced data security: The connection between the two systems helps protect sensitive information as the only employee data shared via your HR system is the bare minimum needed to run payroll and no more, which is a key tenant of the GDPR regulation. 

3) Easy access to payroll documentation: The integration provides a single place available 24/7 to view all payroll and Auto Enrolment documentation.

Additionally, you can also easily provide employees access to virtual payslips, using tools such as myePayWindow.

4) Support financial wellbeing: By utilising additional services such as IRIS Earnings on Demand, you can support employees’ financial wellness and improve staff retention by providing them with on-demand access to a portion of their earnings.

5) Do less with more: Payroll bureaux, in particular, can benefit greatly from the integration as it allows them to utilise our upcoming module, Virtual Payroll Assistant (VPA), that provides greater efficiency by automating convoluted tasks.

Increased payroll accuracy, enhanced security and supporting financial wellbeing are just a few of the ways Payroll and HR professionals can work together to improve engagement and loyalty amongst employees.

The payroll world is changing and here at IRIS, we’re striving to build products that not only drive these changes but also allow organisations to use them to gain a competitive advantage. 

An IRIS solution

We offer best-in-class solutions for both payroll and HR, guaranteeing flawless, hassle-free data flow between the two systems.

For payroll, we offer a wide array of solutions to meet the needs of any business, regardless of if you have one employee or 10,000. View our full suite of payroll products here.

As for HR systems we also have an extensive offering with IRIS HR Professional for SMEs and IRIS Cascade for larger organisations with more complex needs. To find out more why not take a look at all of our HR software options.