5 Key Elements to Look for in a Payroll Platform

Payroll and related costs can make up 50 percent or more of total business costs, so it’s critical to ensure you’re partnering with the right payroll platform to avoid costly errors and drive efficiency across your business.

Not only can the right payroll platform help your team stay organized, but from an employee engagement perspective, it can help make the transition from candidate to new hire seamless.

Is your payroll platform setting you up for success on the people side of your business? Below, we’ve highlighted some key criteria your team should consider when evaluating your current payroll provider and thinking of making the switch to a new partner.

1. Seamless Connection with Your Hiring Platform 

Once a new hire signs an offer letter, key data about the new employee can get lost in the transition between your hiring and payroll platform. But by tapping into a payroll platform that is integrated with your hiring platform, you can easily complete the transition from candidate to employee. With the information you already have on hand from the hiring process, you can automatically create an employee profile and ensure you have everything you need to set each employee up for success from an administrative standpoint. 

2. Digital Onboarding Before the First Day

At a lot of organizations, employees spend the majority of their first day filling out administrative paperwork. But as more time is spent on paperwork, employees might lose the initial excitement they had when they accepted the job offer — and time spent on paperwork also leads to lost productivity. 
To avoid manual paperwork on the first day, your team should look for a payroll provider that includes digital onboarding capabilities. Digital onboarding enables new employees to fill out paperwork once their offer letters are signed and kick off their day-to-day work sooner rather than later. And it saves your HR team from spending time repeating the same onboarding tasks each time a new employee is hired.

Onboarding tasks that can be completed before the first day include: filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms, filling out benefits paperwork, and signing the employee handbook. Expedite this paperwork by sending it electronically before your new hire’s first day.

3. A User-Friendly Interface 

To boost employee engagement and productivity, it’s important for day-to-day administrative tasks to be streamlined. Starting with onboarding and throughout each employee’s time at your company, your team needs to have the right payroll and HR platform in place to make HR-related tasks user-friendly.

Without the right payroll and HR platform, your employees might have no choice but to log into several different systems — such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and more — to complete HR tasks and access important information. This can easily cause employee engagement to take a hit — and might even make
employees frustrated enough to leave your organization. And while employees spend time accessing different HR systems, they’ll have less time to complete productive tasks to drive profitability for your business. 

With the right payroll and HR partner, you can offer employees ways to make HR tasks simple, so employees only need to remember the credentials for one system to retrieve pay stubs, input benefits information, and access tax forms. This will make all HR-related tasks easier on employees and enable them to spend more time on their traditional responsibilities.

4. Effective Reporting 

When considering a new payroll platform, it’s important to look for a partner that offers robust reporting, which will help your team gauge overall business health. The right payroll and HR platform will provide insight into: turnover analysis, benefit plan spend, wage spend, headcount analysis, new hire analysis and employee profitability. By tapping into this data, you can more effectively make key business decisions, such as when to hire or let go of employees based on business needs.

On the employee side, an effective payroll platform can help you provide overall transparency into employee benefits. Unfortunately, many employees don’t have centralized visibility into their total compensation and benefits.

A centralized, automated benefits statement through your payroll platform will enable employees to not only see their paycheck and salary information, but also such benefits as: health insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, flexible spending, life insurance, commuter benefits, retirement benefits, time off, and more. This type of report will help employees feel valued and better understand just how much your organization in investing in each of them. 

5. Dedicated Customer Service

To get the most out of your payroll platform, you’ll likely want to work closely with your platform’s customer service team. When evaluating your current payroll platform – and considering others – the customer service model should be a top consideration. If the only customer service offered is a “Contact Us” page or call center number on the payroll provider’s website, this should be a red flag. Instead, look for a payroll platform that offers a dedicated customer service team. This team will know your business inside and out, making them better equipped to answer questions you have – and help you use the platform as efficiently as possible.

A dedicated customer service team will also help you complete a payroll dry run before officially making the switch to the new platform. Switching to a new payroll provider has a significant impact on any business– and mistakes can easily be made if the information is not migrated to the new platform correctly. Working with the right payroll provider, you can time a dry run a few weeks before you officially move to the new platform, ensuring you avoid the risk of paying employees incorrectly due to administrative errors.

Payroll is just one small piece of effectively managing the people side of your business. Hireology is here to help you attract top talent, hire efficiently and seamlessly transition from candidate to employee with our all-in-one platform. Interested in learning more? Get started now.

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