Payroll Automation

What is Payroll Automation?

Companies of all sizes use payroll automation to deliver payments faster while cutting down on errors.

Robotic process automation is a commonly-used term, reflecting the fact that this system takes simple payroll rules and acts on them. However, not all systems are purely robotic; many incorporate machine learning to check for anomalies.

Why Is It Important to Have a Good Payroll Automation System?

A good payroll automation system saves time, first and foremost. Payroll and HR departments can automatically input, validate, and check data from any department, leaving them to focus on other important tasks.

These systems also keep employee and company data safe. Cloud-based systems, especially, secure employee information better than traditional methods.

What Internal Data Should I Have for a Good Payroll Automation System?

Naturally, these systems use a lot of employee data. Not only their names and bank details for deposits, but also hours worked, overtime, holiday pay, bonuses, compensations, sick days or other leaves of absence, and raises or demotions.

What External Data Is Essential for a Good Payroll System?

Payroll automation requires local tax and regulations data from every government the company or employee operates in. This information rarely changes without warning, but it can be complex, especially for multinational companies, so they may consider using local tax consultants to help with this payroll system.

Also of immense help is currency data, to ensure payments have the most favorable exchange rate.

What External Data May Prove Useful for a Good PayrollSystem?

Payroll automation can easily merge with other HR tasks—employee time tracking, especially. Other examples include workday scheduling and employee analytics, especially sales made and compensation amounts.

Payroll systems can also integrate NLP capabilities by building an in-house chatbot for employees to ask HR-related and payroll questions.

What Are the Main Challenges of this Use Case?

The greatest challenge of payroll automation is validating the accuracy of employee work hours. By upgrading to an employee time tracking system, though, much of this difficulty is resolved.

Additionally, companies that have relied on traditional payroll systems may find the initial adoption of an automatic system very difficult, as it requires complete, comprehensive, and accurate data input in a standard format before running. Even upgrading an existing automatic system to a machine learning-based one that alerts payroll or HR departments to anomalies can be difficult. However, the time later saved in running the program easily makes up for the initial difficulties; once a system is adopted, it runs smoothly and without human supervision.

Finally, companies that operate internationally face challenges in incorporating entirely different regulations and tax laws into the payroll system. Careful and regular inspection of the system by someone knowledgeable in the local regulations, however, should clear up any concerns if companies don’t feel confident in reading and applying the laws alone.

Interesting Case Studies and Blogs to Look Into

Global Payroll Association: What will artificial intelligence mean for payroll?
BenefitsPRO: Improving the payroll process with artificial intelligence

Tangible Examples of Impact

Paychex, which provides solutions for HR, payroll, benefits and insurance, is offering users of Clover, a business management platform from Fiserv, the chance to streamline payroll services as well as time and attendance management, according to a press release.

With Paychex Flex, now available via the Clover App Market, small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can access tools to better manage payroll, staffing, time tracking and scheduling, budgeting time and boosting accuracy while also cutting costs

PYMNTS: Paychex, Clover Team On HR Management