A guide to transformational versus transactional payroll

How does your business manage its payroll? If you’re not using your payroll data to make better decisions, it’s worth making a change in how this important business admin function is run.

Payroll is being transformed as technology plays an influential role. The outcome is your business has access to the sorts of tools that can make compliance easier to manage.

You can also improve your accuracy when it comes to running payroll, while reporting can become a simpler task.

By using payroll software for smarter payroll management, your business can save time on processing data and more on analysing it.

This step change in how you run your payroll can be beneficial – not just for the payroll team but the business as a whole.

Imagine using payroll intelligence to assist you as your business looks to take on new employees – you could use it to create the right compensation plans to attract and retain staff. In the long run, that could pay dividends for the business.

And when it comes to being more influential within the business, a data-driven approach can go a long way to making that happen for payroll leaders.

So do you want your payroll team to simply process faster transactions or take on the bigger challenge of transforming how sensitive data and repetitive payroll tasks are handled?

Transformational versus transactional payroll will help you to make the shift to a payroll data approach that will mean you’re able to add more value to the business.

In this guide, you will find the following topics:

• Payroll – new opportunities and expectations
• Bringing payroll up to speed
• KPIs for transforming the payroll function
• Transitioning payroll into a leadership activity

An excerpt from Transformational versus transactional payroll

How does your existing system compare to the requirements for transformational payroll? KPIs are  the data that drive efficiency and optimisation within companies, and the numbers drawn from the payroll function are some of the most important for any organisation.

Use these four KPIs as a guide to determine where there is opportunity to become more efficient and as a conversation starter to propose investment in an updated solution should you identify ample room for improvement.

1. Cycle time to resolve errors

Cost is an obvious important factor in payroll efficiency. However, while those numbers are important for calculating the bottom line, they ignore the fact that payroll as a function is a service department first – and its customers are your employees.

For the employee, any time spent correcting errors is too long. Of course, you want the time to identify and resolve problems to be as swift as possible to keep employees happy and your payroll operations on track, but there are additional insights to be garnered from this KPI.

A lengthy resolution time could indicate a staffing issue, such as too few staff for the workload, an inefficient process, insufficient training, or data issues upstream. Depending on the number of errors reported each period – another KPI to monitor – the costs of fixing errors could be bloating your overall payroll costs and impacting other metrics.

Additionally, the stress of prolonged error resolution could impact satisfaction for both the payroll professional and the affected employee, and anyone else involved in the resolution.

Read Transformational versus transactional payroll to see the other three KPIs and for more information to help your team stay on top of your payroll requirements.