How to secure buy-in from IT for transforming your payroll

Obsolete or undiscovered? Take a new look at pay

If you’re trying to sell in a payroll transformation project to your IT colleagues, you may be hit with the question ‘why do we need to change?’ The answer, as highlighted in this free guide from ADP, is that your business can simply no longer afford to ignore payroll when trying to reduce costs and increase operational efficiency.¹

With COVID-19, 66% of decision makers turned their focus to cost optimisation, while 34% prioritised operational efficiencies

In today’s market, improving your payroll function makes perfect business sense: safeguarding agility, supporting employee well-being, while ensuring the efficiency and compliance of your digital infrastructure. Meanwhile, those IT stakeholders in your business are likely to have a rigorous checklist of requirements from a payroll solution:

Optimising payroll

Now that we know what an ideal payroll solution looks like, the next step to unlocking payroll’s hidden potential is to optimise it. This means migrating your payroll to a digital payroll solution. This step in itself will need buy-in from wider teams inside the business, including IT. Whether you decide to outsource payroll or rely on an inhouse department, IT colleagues will be key in supporting this transition.

Once payroll is optimised, IT teams can focus on more valuable tasks, such as implementing upgrades, managing data security and integrating payroll with other HR solutions.

How payroll transformation supports IT objectives

There’s a clear business case for payroll modernisation. So how can migrating payroll to the cloud, or a more capable provider, help support wider IT goals?

Time to leave on-premise

The answer, when contemplating transforming payroll, is to resist doing nothing. The average multinational runs 32 different payroll systems, resulting in high staffing costs, system complexity and a lack of integration.⁶  Keeping payroll inhouse is proven to be expensive and impractical, with overburdened staff trying to navigate regulatory compliance, while ensuring business continuity, data security and frequent system updates with third-party vendors.

When moving to the cloud ensure you choose a reputable provider, like ADP, who can provide a tailored solution designed to fit the level of support your business needs.

The move to the cloud has brought us greater flexibility. The system can grow or shrink as our business requires, with less effort needed to upscale our cloud capacity.

Steve Drury, Pay Service Lead, Cargill ⁷

Risk or protect?

Migrating your payroll to a reputable provider who takes security seriously is absolutely key. Security is automatically integrated in ADP’s payroll software, so that meeting compliance obligations are no longer a headache. Other security features to look out for in your chosen provider include:

• Dedicated security, risk and privacy specialists on hand to protect clients’ operations
• Round-the-clock advanced protection support from multiple critical incident response centres, 365 days a year
• Constant data monitoring by specialists in case of suspicious activity
• Quarterly security patches for cloud software

Expensive or economical?

Cloud payroll solutions do require an initial investment, but in the long-term are more cost-effective than on-premise. Payroll migration could return significant dividends faster. So if you’re wondering whether to take the leap, consider the following:

• Companies that moved from on-premise to an ADP cloud solution saved between 15 and 35 per cent⁸
• According to a Forrester Consulting study to evaluate the total economic impact (TEI) of ADP Global Payroll, companies could receive an ROI of 134 per cent and payback within 12 months⁹

The case for consolidation

In place of multiple payroll systems, the way ahead for you and your IT colleagues could be one simple, scalable payroll solution. With unified global payroll processing, you and your wider teams have a single view of employee data worldwide. Make sure you choose a provider with a tailored service that grows with your business, and geographic reach. Other benefits of consolidation include:

• Cost efficiencies of one global payroll
• Easier to apply updates and security patches
• Seamless data sharing between countries without IT support for GDPR
• Straightforward integration with other human capital management (HCM) systems
• Lower security risk from one global payroll compared to multiple local systems
• Less need for third-party HR and payroll vendors from implementation training and maintenance resources

Choosing the right payroll provider for your IT goals

Whether you’re looking for a new payroll provider, or assessing your current arrangements, try asking the following questions:

• Is your chosen payroll software available in the cloud?
• Does your chosen payroll software offer advanced security features?
• Does your chosen payroll provider support implementation?
• Does your chosen payroll software support advanced functionality such as process automation?
• Does your chosen payroll solution integrate with HCM software?
• Does your chosen payroll solution support your digital transformation initiatives?
• Does your chosen payroll solution support your business continuity plans?
• Does your chosen payroll solution have all the functionality you need to transform your payroll process and support your IT priorities?

Remember, a reputable provider will work with you to ensure that all members of your internal team, including IT stakeholders, are informed and supported throughout the transition to a cloud payroll solution.