How payroll can help you have a more profitable practice
Payroll is an essential service for businesses, with payroll providers as trusted partners for managing key processes. It can also be a foundation for building a profitable, efficient practice based on value-driven client relationships.
Traditionally, payroll required a large amount of manual work from payroll providers, leading many accountants to consider it a loss leader. However, new digital payroll solutions have created the opportunity to increase efficiency, value and retention without growing your overheads. In this article, we explore how the right payroll software can help you grow your profits and your client list.
Increased internal efficiency
The efficiency of your workflows control the amount of clients you can manage, and the profitability of your services. Repetitive, manual work limits the amount of clients you can manage per team member and slows your growth.
Increasing your efficiency can help you add more clients to your business without needing additional team members or adding additional overheads, but this requires tools that can automate manual tasks.
BrightPay payroll software is designed to give payroll bureaus the tools they need to grow an efficient, profitable practice, reducing time spent on admin, back-ups and client communication.
With BrightPay, you can remove the time-consuming data-entry by instantly syncing your payroll journals with the client’s accounting software. You can also save time by automatically backing-up your files to the cloud with no need for in-house servers or manual review.
Creating new services
While every business needs to manage basic payroll, to pay employees and manage their workforce, there are a range of other pain points associated with payroll that can be the foundation of new value-added services.
The needs of clients change over time, for example, as they grow and add new employees. Rapidly expanding businesses face challenges updating their processes to accommodate higher work volumes. Workflows that worked fine for a small workforce may now fail to scale. For example, clients may find themselves wasting hours managing annual leave or losing track of new starters and leavers.
Payroll providers are ideally placed to guide their clients in creating value-adding payroll processes, and implementing them to benefit the wider business. For example, by moving to a cloud-enabled payroll platform such as Bright Pay Connect, employees can receive payslips, read important company updates, update their personal details and request annual leave through the mobile payroll app, creating a more scalable process.
By offering tangible value to clients, you can guide them towards a value-driven relationship where services match their needs, reflected in higher prices that match that value.
Client self-management
Payroll is a team effort, requiring input from clients to provide the necessary information, approvals and direction to sign off every month.
In practice, this means that accountants and payroll bureaus can lose hours of time chasing, organising and correcting client’s efforts to ensure that they remain compliant and on track; eating into billable time and damaging client relationships
Choosing the right payroll software provider can help you share a significant amount of the workload with your clients, without increasing their perception of effort. BrightPay includes a dashboard for employers to manage their team and communicate with payroll providers. From the dashboard, clients can easily add new starter details, upload timesheets and review payroll additions and deductions for that pay period.
Meanwhile, BrightPay Payroll Software’s cloud extension, BrightPay Connect, includes a self-service employee portal to reduce routine queries, and answer basic day-to-day questions for employees, saving payroll providers additional time.
Embrace profitable payroll
Payroll should work for clients and providers alike. By putting value, efficiency, and engagement at the heart of their service, providers can increase margins and retention while keeping clients satisfied and connected. However, this requires a shift away from manual workflows that don’t add tangible value.
Choosing a modern payroll solution with cloud capabilities gives your firm the opportunity to do more of the work that makes a difference to your clients, while also growing your business.
To find out how BrightPay can help you build a more profitable practice, check out a free online demo of our software. We also offer 60-day free trials if you would like to try it for yourself so you can see the difference it can make.