What value does payroll bring to UK businesses?

Payroll has been a business-critical function for so long that many organisations now consider it a BAU task, diminishing its value in a sense as it’s expected to ‘always be there.’

However, due to recent advancements in technology, payroll can now provide a vast range of additional benefits including employee engagement, boosted morale, retention, financial wellbeing and reporting to name a few.

Many organisations are missing out on these benefits because they’re utilising outdated technology and payroll processes.

To support, we’ve created this blog to delve into how a modern payroll solution can help you achieve these benefits while also conducting its primary function, paying people accurately and on time.

What is the importance of payroll?

Research from Kronos found that 24% of employees would look for a new job after one payroll error and 49% would seek new employment after two payroll errors.

If you’re unable to pay employees on time and accurately, your business will never truly operate at its full potential.

This is for a range of reasons:

• Following on from Kronos’ research, payroll is central to building and maintaining the employer-employee relationship which plays a crucial role in building a positive and productive workplace culture.
• Payroll plays a fundamental part in maintaining compliance with ever-changing legislation such as Holiday Pay.
• One of the largest operational costs for many businesses is payroll, consuming an enormous amount of time and resources, especially when you consider that one payroll mistake that takes seconds to make can waste 20% of an employee’s time.

Is payroll linked directly to the employee experience?

“Nearly 80% of executives rated employee experience as very important.” – Deloitte

As payroll is often perceived as a back-office function, its impact on businesses often flies under the radar.

However, it’s directly linked to the employee experience and running an efficient and accurate payroll has crucial benefits for both businesses and employees:

Financial wellbeing: As the millennial generation has begun to dominate the workforce, payroll requirements have changed and evolved. A desire for 24/7 payslip availability has emerged and if provided can enable employees to improve their budgeting and financial wellbeing.

Increased retention: By making employees aware of Automatic Enrolment and their pensions, not only are you ensuring compliance but you’re also enabling employees to save for their future, which is likely to increase retention.

Happy and productive employees: Accurate pay, visibility and pensions are all fundamental to ensuring a happy and productive workforce. You can also integrate your payroll and HR solutions to further improve the employee experience, streamlining onboarding and your Holiday Pay requirements.

Reporting: PwC surveyed 1,000 senior executives, finding that data-driven organisations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making compared to those who utilise data less.

How can you ensure your payroll is compliant and correct?

Due to the sheer amount of moving parts in a large organisation, it can be extremely challenging and time-consuming to ensure an accurate payroll each month.

Especially, if a modern payroll solution isn’t in place, the processes become increasingly susceptible to human error.

To tackle this challenge, organisations must invest in a modern payroll solution that can automate their tasks, streamlining processes and reducing the risk of mistakes.

The first step towards elevating your payroll

IRIS Payroll Professional is a flexible and powerful payroll solution designed to support organisations with more complex and convoluted payroll requirements.

Our solution is used to process payments for 70,000 UK organisations annually, supporting all your reporting, RTI, Automatic Enrolment and data security requirements.

With built-in functionality, we ensure your processes are streamlined so you can look forward with confidence, for more information on IRIS Payroll Professional, click here.

However, if payroll is still too much of a burden for your organisation don’t worry, IRIS can fully manage your payroll thanks to our outsourcing solution.

If you have any questions regarding your payroll, talk to our highly experienced payroll team on 0344 815 5656.