Overcoming the Payroll Challenge

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There are 13 million¹ people employed by 2.4 million²  businesses in Australia.² Given the proverbial payroll cycle is rife with legislative and logistical obstacles, processing accurate, compliant and prompt payroll requires many working parts. That’s The Payroll Challenge.

To overcome this challenge, payroll teams need to effectively manage six interconnected dependencies. From ensuring compliance, satisfying pay conditions, and maintaining security to integrating multiple interconnected systems and managing various business structures. Fine-tuning the following six pillars can lead to payroll perfection!

1. Delivering a rich employee experience
Paper forms, manual inputs and printed, hand-delivered payslips. These error-prone, antiquated processes get in the way of the flexibility and autonomy employees want from their workplace.

2. Managing a flexible business structure
With 60% of the 2.4 million Australian businesses being multi-entity in structure,⁴ integration is everything. When all functions are consolidated, you can abolish manual keying and duplication to guarantee accuracy and compliance despite complexities.

3. Managing interconnected payroll systems
Direct and third-party inputs, throughputs and outputs, award conditions, enterprise agreements and external contractors. Add to this several ABN layers – it’s a payroll jungle out there. To diminish mistakes, ensure the data between your payroll software and application work seamlessly.

4. Ensuring payroll trust and compliance
90% of Australian payroll managers find interpreting legislation or awards around employee entitlements and payments either confusing or contradictory.⁵ To navigate this, your payroll software needs to program a painless pathway through the legislation. And because payroll is constant, your support and business contingency options need to be too.

5. Maintaining business continuity
Payroll never rests. When part of your payroll team is ill or there are changes in the business or the broader landscape, conserving continuity is difficult. In this context, it’s crucial to have access to outsourcing and recruitment services and a dedicated local support team with payroll experience.

6. Gaining rich employee visibility
Whether you’re a single or a multi-entity structure, growth brings bugbears. If your legacy systems fail to keep up, you’ll have no visibility over detailed employee history for compliance and audit trails, position changes, salaries, awards and pay conditions for employees.

Crush the payroll challenge

See how your payroll software stacks up to the payroll challenge with these resources and quiz provided by the Access Group.