Is now the best era for payroll management?
Which era would you prefer to live in? It’s a question often pondered and the more romantic among us might point to ancient Greece, the swinging 60s or the Renaissance as periods of great human achievement. For most though, the answer is right now, now being the cumulation of all that accomplishment.
Those who champion today as the best time to live usually point to advances in medicine and human rights. For the payroll bureau, it’s about how embracing the cloud makes their payroll tasks easier, especially if they have experienced working life pre-cloud. Recent technology advancements are now providing real benefits to streamline payroll management.
BrightPay Connect, a cloud add-on to BrightPay's payroll software, gives modern accountancy practices a level of real time data visibility that would be the envy of accountants in decades past. Cloud automation now enables greater connectivity between bureaus and employers.
Here are just five ways BrightPay Connect makes a real difference to modern payroll:
1. Frees up time by eliminating routine admin tasks
Using BrightPay Connect, bureaus can reduce the payroll administration burden on their business and focus their attention on growth activities. For example, payroll reports set up on your BrightPay desktop automatically sync to BrightPay Connect and are available on the online employer dashboard. Clients can easily log in to view all payroll data, eliminating the admin work involved for both parties.
Instead of clients wasting time requesting payroll reports each pay period, all of the payroll data is up-to-date and instantly visible on the client’s own cloud portal. The time clawed back can be used for strategic thought or business development activities. Online payroll access can make the difference between slow and rapid communication between you and your clients giving time back unimagined in previous generations.
2. Empower employees to access payslips on the go
Despite the political and social chaos of the moment, we do live in more enlightened times, and employees have more rights now than in any other time in human history. Part of that evolution involves employee empowerment, an integral aspect to BrightPay Connect’s appeal. Employers can now offer employees easier access to their own payroll data via the BrightPay Connect employee app. Easier online access is convenient for the engaged workforce and the employer, whose HR team are again free to focus on other core operations.
Employees can browse and download their history of payslips and HR documents. Employees can also view their own leave calendar with an overview of annual leave, sick leave and parenting leave, request annual leave, and amend their contact details where appropriate. This is in line with the GDPR requirement for employers to keep the most up-to-date information on employees.
Employees who require payslips as part of a loan application no longer need waste time requesting historic payslips from their employer. All their payslip data is within their grasp, downloadable and printable 24/7 on the employee self-service portal. This independence matters to the modern workforce. Requests for lost or historic payslips become a thing of the past.
Leave requests can be viewed and processed in real time, allowing HR to ensure staff levels are always at their optimum. All leave requests approved by employers are automatically synced to BrightPay on the bureau’s desktop. Again, the seamless automation involved positively impacts all parties.
3. Automatic cloud backup means increased data security
Our forebears had a harder time in guaranteeing the security of their payroll data. Print had its limitations and was a time-consuming process. Although hacking is a modern scourge, greater digital sophistication means company and client records are safer than in any other era.
All communication between BrightPay on your PC or Mac and the BrightPay Connect servers is carried out on a safe channel with maximum security. Payroll information is backed up every 15 minutes and logged backups are all accessible to restore anytime, if needed. Most importantly from a data security perspective, BrightPay Connect is hosted in Microsoft Azure and all payroll files are encrypted.
4. Facilitates shared responsibility with clients
The manual nature of payroll in bygone eras always posed the likelihood of human error. Time spent finding and correcting payroll mistakes, while maintaining client confidence, added to the challenge of payroll accuracy.
With BrightPay Connect, bureaus can send requests to their clients asking for their employee hours each pay period. This information flows seamlessly back to the bureau portal, and back to the payroll software. Bureaus can then send their client a summary of the payroll to review and approve before the payroll is finalised. This approval feature places accountability on the client to ensure the payroll is 100% accurate.
A full audit trail is also recorded, tracking the correspondence and requests sent between the bureau and the client. This communication report adds extra security to the payroll process and further reduces the potential for errors at the bureau’s end. Data entry tasks at the bureau’s end are substantially reduced by delegating this task to the client, saving the bureau time.
5. Ensuring GDPR compliance
The GDPR came to the fore over the last few years. There is pressure on all businesses to ensure protection and security of all data, including that of employees. Because of the GDPR measures taken, more has been done recently than at any time in the past to protect data privacy.
BrightPay’s employee self-service portal compliments that GDPR requirement. Employees can easily view their own payroll and HR data in a secure environment online via a web browser anytime and anywhere. There is a feature that allows employees to edit and update their personal contact information, whenever it suits them.
All changes to employee details that have been approved by clients flow seamlessly to BrightPay on the bureau’s desktop, ensuring all personal data is up to date, as required by the GDPR. Complying with this landmark data protection legislation would be a much more daunting task without BrightPay Connect at hand.
For anyone working in a payroll bureau, the question ‘What era would you prefer to live in?’ should be easy to answer once you think about what BrightPay Connect can offer today.
Book a BrightPay Connect demo today to discover more features that can streamline your payroll processes.