5 payroll hacks for HR professionals

Payroll is an essential, but extremely time-consuming task.

With contingency planning top of the agenda for most businesses right now, we know you need to make sure your people are paid no matter what.

We also know that payroll is not just a task for payroll experts – HR professionals play a fundamental role in making sure payroll runs smoothly.

And with this year’s payroll year end recently over, we wanted to help you understand how you can get ahead so the next one is less of a headache.

So, we’re sharing five top payroll tips for HR professionals…

1. Remove paperwork – traditional payroll processes involve reams and reams of paperwork being passed around a business, running the risk of data breaches, lost information, errors and more. So, most businesses have moved to their payroll to processes on specialised systems, such as a cloud payroll app, with the ability to connect HR and payroll data together. Storing all your people data in one central place not only reduces risk, it also simplifies your payroll process saving time and money.
2. Engage your ‘clients’ – getting paid is a hugely important part of an employee’s experience in the workplace. After all, the rest of their financial lives depends on receiving a salary correctly and on time. Financial worries are also a key contributor to stress-related illness. So, spend some time reviewing the client experience you’re providing your employees. Making sure your people have easy access to all the payroll information they need, such as their payslip, P60, FAQs such as next pay date, will improve the employee payroll experience and reduce the number of general questions you’re asked about pay.
3. Share the responsibility – confirming each detail of your data from the very beginning is an important part of making your payroll simpler. Common data entry mistakes are made during the onboarding of new employees, so take extra care here. But we also recommend sharing the responsibility with your employees throughout their career with your business. After all, your payroll is largely based on employee personal data and so each individual has a clear stake in wanting payroll to run successfully. Set up a regular review for your employees to check their personal data is still correct and make sure they know how to make changes if it isn’t. If you use timesheets and expenses, you’ll also need a process in place to check for inconsistencies. 
4. Stay ‘in the know’ – payroll legislation is ever evolving, so keeping up-to-date can be a time consuming (yet essential) challenge. Payroll software that responds to changing legislation is a top time-saver here, and you can also schedule a regular review of the Government’s website to understand what changes are coming up and what they’ll mean for you. You can also schedule regular changes you know to expect such as the National Living Wage and National Minimum Wage rates which change each tax year.
5. Set an annual payroll calendar – payroll comes with monthly and annual responsibilities brimming full of sub-tasks and requirements. For example, you have a monthly requirement to pay HMRC the tax and National Insurance you owe as reported on your previous tax month’s Full Payment Submission (FPS) minus the reductions on any Employer Payment Summary (EPS) you sent before the 19th in the current tax month. Set up a schedule of these, breaking each responsibility into sub tasks, to help you stay ahead of each one.

Contact our expert team on 0344 815 5528 to find out more about simplifying your processes through HR and payroll integration.