Any well-run business will seek to maintain an efficient and secure financial infrastructure. An essential component of this is payroll. Now, as the UK begins to leave its lockdown and recover itself from a historic recession, businesses are applying even greater scrutiny to their payroll departments to ensure that their finances are more efficient, reliable, and secure than ever before.
Ensuring that an internal payroll department minimises its errors is difficult or, at best, time-consuming and expensive. It requires staff proficiency that comes from training and secure, modern software if it is to be done effectively. As a greater number of external payroll companies establish themselves and their reputation, however, more businesses are beginning to outsource their payroll departments altogether.
If you are considering outsourcing your payroll or weighing up how it may improve your business, here are the key points.
Legislation Obligations
One of the most important aspects of payroll is adhering to tax legislation, which, as many employers will know, requires an up-to-date understanding of HMRC expectations. A notable example is the upcoming IR35 tax law, which is undergoing further changes set to take place in April 2021. This will extend the reach of IR35 among both the public and private sectors. Failing to adapt to such changes will leave a business open to penalisation.
Handing over this responsibility to external payroll companies, such as the reputable People Group Services, relieves you of such potential risk and ensures that you and all staff are in adherence to the most recent tax legislation
Established Remote Systems
As many internal payroll departments have discovered during the lockdown, being unable to access the office complicates even simple tasks, whether this is for staff or management. Cloud-based payroll systems have been a great remedy to this issue, allowing for documents to be accessed remotely and with ease.
Many businesses, however, either aren’t already equipped with the software required to operate in such a way or are unable to justify the cost of a potentially temporary most to cloud-based operation. It can be a daunting transition to undertake, however, it is ultimately a rewarding one. Digital payroll is more secure and GDPR compliant than paper-based alternatives and will enable your payroll to be more efficient.
Improved Oversight and Analytics
Overseeing your payroll allows you to better understand your business. The data can reveal flaws in staffing as well as revealing areas for improvement. There are dedicated software and techniques that can be utilised to present this data in visualisations that allow for a clear understanding of how business can be improved. Most external payroll companies will offer such services as part of their package, which is an added bonus that enables you to save on the cost of software and training required to create such data maps.
Error Avoidance
Payroll errors are problematic at any time, but especially so during our economy’s recovery from recession. At a time when the issues of even minor mistakes can be problematic, it is important to mitigate as much risk as possible from a department such as payroll. Outsourcing removes all risk of error from your internal payroll obligations, ensuring that staff are paid correctly and promptly.
