Is your payroll ready for business expansion?

Deloitte recently found in the M&A 2020 Trends Report that 63% of businesses foresee a merger deal activity increase over the next 12 months.

It’s an extremely exciting time for businesses to operate, as growth and expansion are becoming huge goals.

But for those looking to expand either via Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) or organically, their payroll needs to be ready to accommodate the growth.

Especially since M&A can be high risk, high reward, so if your payroll isn’t ready to accommodate a wave of new employees, it will not go well.

The challenges for payroll during business growth

Ultimately if employees aren’t paid, they won’t work and if by some miracle they do continue to come in, your relationship with them will be massively damaged.

To avoid the worst-case scenario of tumbleweed on payday, below are a couple of key areas you need to consider when managing your payroll during business growth to ensure it’s successful.

Merging your workforce

The immediate thought for most payroll professionals is the challenge of merging your existing workforce with the newly acquired business.

Two separate payroll systems each with their own specific processes and quirks can make the transition excruciating.

Sensitive data

Employee payroll data will undoubtedly have a lot of sensitive information, creating added pressure for businesses to transfer the data securely.

As a result, you must ensure that your processes and software have the necessary focus on security and GDPR compliance.

HR integration

Integration between your payroll and HR software needs to be a consideration.

As both areas will receive quite a lot of change, if they aren’t integrated, confusion and duplication are likely to follow.

What can you do to ensure your payroll is ready for business growth?

Modern payroll software

By ensuring you have a modern payroll software in place you can make the transition of onboarding new employees and merging details significantly easier.

The contrast between merging your workforce via outdated processes such as spreadsheets and via a best of breed software is huge.

The ability to automate certain tasks and easily access/send data securely is invaluable to the process.

For example, our solution, IRIS Payroll Professional specifically supports business growth, enabling businesses to bulk upload data into our secure platform.

Also, IRIS Payroll Professional enables seamless integration with our HR offering, supporting every critical aspect of your business.

Outsource your payroll

However, managing payroll during situations such as M&A may simply be too great a task to efficiently do, even with a modern payroll solution.

If this is the case, consider outsourcing your payroll.

By entrusting your responsibility to a large payroll bureau, you can ensure employees will be paid accurately and on time, every time.

Our Managed Payroll service is run by a team of highly skilled, CIPP-accredited payroll experts that completely alleviate your responsibility, allowing you to refocus your time on other aspects of your business growth.

For more information on IRIS Payroll Professional or Managed Payroll, click here to see our full payroll suite.

Stephanie Coward

Managing Director, HCM

Stephanie Coward is Managing Director for HCM at IRIS, where she leads the strategy, innovation and growth of the organisation’s HR and payroll portfolio. She is responsible for positioning IRIS as a trusted partner to HR professionals and ensuring its solutions support the evolving needs of modern workforces.

With more than 25 years’ experience in the technology sector, Stephanie brings deep commercial and operational expertise, with a passion for improving the employee experience through technology.

Stephanie is committed to advancing IRIS’ HCM offering and helping organisations build more resilient, empowered workforces.