Is it time to outsource your payroll?

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a huge amount of pressure on businesses, requiring many to assess existing processes and areas that can benefit from cost savings.

One area in particular that can gain added value from a revamp is payroll.

Factors such as the Job Retention Scheme (JRS), new legislation and ever-changing processes can easily be overwhelming for many businesses.

This poses the question - could outsourcing your payroll be the best solution and help you cut costs?

In this blog, we’ll analyse some of the key challenges associated with payroll as well as the benefits of outsourcing.

The challenges of payroll

Running a correct and compliant payroll isn’t easy, below are a few factors you need to consider.

Furloughing and the Job Retention Scheme

The Job Retention Scheme has provided crucial support during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has also been subject to frequent change, creating a huge amount of complexity for payroll professionals looking to remain compliant.

Time and resources

Running an in-house payroll often has a much greater cost than what appears on the surface level.

You must consider factors such as server maintenance, training, software costs, a payroll manager’s salary and most importantly the time invested into maintaining all these aspects.

For help calculating the true cost of your in-house payroll, check out our handy factsheet here.

Human error

Managing payroll can often be prone to human error, especially if you’re reliant on spreadsheets or not particularly familiar with the processes.

Making one simple mistake can not only result in a huge amount of time being required to correct the error but it can have severe consequences regarding your relationship with employees.

In fact, CIPP recently discovered that 21% of people would change jobs if their pay was either late or incorrect.

Legislative changes

Payroll legislation is always changing, for example, we recently saw alterations to Holiday Pay calculations and IR35 is due to be implemented early next year.

This constant stream of new and updated legislation requires those managing payroll to invest a huge amount of time into maintaining compliance.

How can outsourcing help?

Ultimately the goal of outsourcing is to remove the above challenges and ensure a flawless payroll, alleviating your responsibility by entrusting a specialist provider with the task.

Key benefits include:

• Reduced stress
• Guaranteed compliance
• Accurate and on-time payroll
• Provides cashflow visibility
• Save money
• No-touch e-payslips
• Increase productivity
• Optimise security

IRIS Managed Payroll

Utilising our 40 years of experience we created our IRIS Fully Managed Payroll service that features a 70+ strong team of highly skilled payroll managers and a 99.9% accuracy rate.

Whether you’re a corporate organisation, GP or a sole trader, our service can help you save time and reduce costs.

“We have been very happy with the service we receive from IRIS. Their payroll is easy and efficient and always on time. They are helpful with any queries and are happy to make changes if necessary.” - Sharon Elvin, Registered Care Manager, Partners in Care (SW) Ltd

If you’re thinking about outsourcing payroll, check out our IRIS Fully Managed Payroll service today.