Business leaders have had a tough time of it of late.
Many are struggling with rising costs, depressed revenues, and a gloomy financial outlook. On this difficult business landscape, it’s no surprise that many are looking at where they can make their operations leaner, more predictable, and more cost-and-resource effective.
A smart managed payroll agreement is just one place to do this. With in-house payroll processing costing small businesses billions every pay run, and countless hours in lost HR and finance team time, many have turned to outsourced payroll. This is because it can reduce effort on admin tasks, boost efficiency and reliability, and deliver an efficient for staff and the business alike.
Thinking about outsourcing to a managed payroll provider? Then read on below to find out why most organisations are outsourcing at least some part of their payroll, and how managed payroll solutions are delivering for organisations time and time again.
1. Managed payroll providers save businesses time
The most clear-cut reason that businesses are turning to outsource payroll processing, such as Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution, is because managed payroll saves huge amounts of time for HR.
On average, in-house pay runs take circa five hours of resources each month. However, if HR can outsource everything related to payroll – from data entry, calculating statutory payments and deductions, electronic returns, and running and processing all reports from pensions to P45s and P60s – it can claw back crucial people and team resources.
This is borne out by the stats. For example, one 2020 study showed that for businesses that outsource at least part of their payroll processing, the effort levels for pay activity drop by up to 70%.
2. A managed payroll solution can cut costs
Expert HR time, expert finance team time, compliance, checks, and maintaining systems… the costs involved in payroll processing add up! Indeed, it’s estimated that small businesses spend £ 1.7 billion cumulatively on payroll processing each month.
However, turning to a managed payroll provider is one way businesses can save. That’s because everything from compliance, intensive security certification, system maintenance, checks, processing and initial data entry are included in packages such as Cezanne HR’s Smart Managed Payroll service. As a result, all those in-house costs required for a team of experts are no longer needed.
In addition, the best providers will offer both people and business flexibility. For example, Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution only bills you for the number of employees you need to process in that pay run. This means the service can be adapted to suit the needs of a business at virtually any time.
3. Managed payroll solutions can reduce errors
Recent figures show that nine out of 10 businesses make payroll errors every month. This can hit staff finances and wellbeing, as well as the business’ brand.
However, with a managed payroll solution which automates and digitises as much of the process as possible, humans can be removed from the process. This minimises the risk of costly errors, whether they’re in data entry, payslip processing, or in ensuring that payroll is legally compliant.
What’s more, the right provider, such as Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution, gives organisations access to payroll customer service experts at any point of the process to raise queries and forestall any potential issues.
4. Managed payroll solutions take care of GDPR compliance and security certification
Earlier this year, BBC and British Airways were hit by payroll breaches. It’s such breaches that put businesses at risk of fines of up to 4% of their turnover or a €20 million fine under data regulations.
However, whilst undoubtedly of utmost importance, ensuring great security and GDPR compliance can be time intensive and requires expertise in multiple areas. As such, many businesses turn to payroll providers with a great track record of GDPR compliance as well as those who can show they have great security processes, including regular testing and certification such as ISO27001. It means safety, no negative news headlines, and happy people.
5. Managed payroll solutions offer great EX for employees
More than ever, employees expect a consumer-grade experience of workplace technology. This is where managed payroll services can help.
For example, with Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution, employees can access digital payslips whenever and wherever they need, putting them in control of their financial data. In addition, as a modular element of a broader HRIS, people can use a single sign-on to access their performance data, career opportunities and workplace details in the same place as their pay whilst API and webhooks allow seamless integration with other workplace systems.
6. Managed payroll solutions provide expanded data utility
More and more businesses are using the people data they have to drive business performance. For those that use Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution, they can rest easy that with the ability to connect payroll data to Cezanne HR’s insights module, HR professionals can use their payroll data to inform people analysis, trend prediction and create top-level management reports to help the business thrive.
What’s more, an initial data upload and registering of data changes across all modules means the use and entry of data becomes a time saver rather than a time sink for busy businesses that don’t have access to limitless resources.
7. Outsourcing payroll drives business satisfaction
As laid out earlier in this article, outsourcing payroll can save time and money boosting the efficiency of the pay process. Unsurprisingly, as Deloitte discovered in their payroll research, this has resulted in an 82% satisfaction rate from those outsourcing pay to payroll providers,
Here, businesses report that outsourcing payroll helps them with quality of service, driving HR efficiencies and productivity, and better data accuracy. All things that make a healthy business tick.
8. Outsourcing payroll drives flexibility
Not only can a great managed payroll solution, like Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll solution, flex to how much a business is able to spend on outsourced services, or where it is in the business lifecycle, but it can help deliver flexible payroll solutions to deal with the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
Cezanne HR’s solution allows multi-schedule processing and pay runs can happen on different timescales which means that they can change pay frequency or deliver one-off bonuses to help employees who need it most.
9. Managed payroll providers keep up with changing legislation
In the UK, payroll legislation can evolve rapidly. In the last few years, there have been changes to the upper tax rate, national insurance, pension contributions and the massive impact of furlough. Getting this right and making adequate changes can be a huge payroll time sink.
However, solutions such as Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll come with automatic data provision so businesses don’t have to stay up to date with legislation themselves. Instead, they can rest safe in the knowledge that their payroll provider is doing the hard yards for them in keeping up to date with changes to payroll law.
10. Payroll providers turn payroll from burden to benefit
Even before a difficult many were struggling with payroll with only one in twenty businesses saying they didn’t have any payroll challenges. Here, they cited having enough internal resources to deliver payroll effectively, keeping payroll accurate, ensuring pay runs went off on time, and security as top challenges.
Yet, outsourcing can help circumvent these problems. A managed payroll provider can deliver a seamless, secure and compliant service, backed by a team of payroll experts, that ensures that internal challenges become outsourced solutions that the whole workforce will enjoy.
What’s more, if payroll becomes a genuine business resource rather than a burden it can help the businesses utilise payroll to drive successful business outcomes. With more and more business managers looking for payroll to give them insights — and with solutions such as Cezanne HR’s smart managed payroll able to do this, via access to an insight and analytics module along payroll — payroll is already being used as a true business resource rather than something that causes a business issues.
Author bio: Dan Cave is an award-winning HR journalist and editor. He has been reporting in the HR space for over five years and works across the business press.
