This week, we ran our final webinar of 2023. It was a great opportunity for us to reflect on some key products launched this year on the global payroll control platform as well as take a look at the 2024 roadmap and inform everyone about some expected developments for the year ahead.
Our CEO, Fidelma McGuirk was joined by our Head of Product Daniela Barbova and our Product Solutions Consultant Nigel Bateman for a look back at 2023 highlights along with a sneak preview of coming attractions in 2024. Here’s a quick summary of some of the key takeaways from the webinar.
Payroll is broken
Fidelma mentioned that while most global employees experience the satisfaction of being paid accurately and on time- a huge amount of effort goes on behind the scenes to make this a reality and it is never anywhere near as smooth as it should be. Payroll is broken from a data and process approach and everything we do on the global payroll control platform is designed to fix global payroll.
Global payroll professionals at multinational organisations around the world are being forced to deliver multicountry payroll against challenging deadlines set by service providers while also working with out-of-date practices, inappropriate payroll models and non-existent technology. All of which combined to make global payroll delivery and management so much harder than it needs to be.
The AI buzz
Artificial intelligence is the buzzword of the year in 2023 and it will dominate the global news headlines in 2024. We can expect all business-critical service deliveries to be impacted by it in the new year, and that includes global payroll. Fidelma spoke positively about the potential implications of AI in payroll particularly in the game changing space of automated validations and pre-payroll data automation. There is enormous potential for AI and automation technology to save a huge number of hours with daily payroll processing. But first, the structures need to be in place, specifically how you handled your data.
“Before you can do anything, the key input is data. We put a lot of the building blocks in place to enable AI to be used”
Fidelma McGuirk
CEO, Payslip
AI is not a quick fix, or a silver bullet solution and it cannot be anywhere near as helpful as you might think if your payroll data is a mess. What you need to focus on first is putting the building blocks in place to support any introduction of AI based technology. This has been the Payslip approach long before AI started to dominate the news headlines this year. We lay the foundations for AI by standardising and harmonising your data-this way your payroll department is ready to leverage the full potential of AI and automation technology.
2023 Platform Highlights
Next up was Nigel, who did some excellent live demos showcasing a few of the platform features which helped save time and make day-to-day payroll processing easier for our global clients this year.
Integrations as a Service
He spoke about how are integrations as a service functionality makes it possible to automate pre-payroll data inputs from all of the multiple different sources that you are likely to deal with: HCMs, local country providers, payroll software systems, finance applications and Stock & Equity apps. He showed how Payslip automate the pre-payroll data from all of them saving you lots of hours and reducing errors.
The platform accepts data inputs from multiple sources ( HCM and non-HCM) and ingests them- it can then send the relevant data out to the local country vendors and also send payslips all the way back to Workday or wherever needed. The entire process is fully automated, so global payroll professionals are only required to check anomalies.
Reporting:
As you know, Payslip offers detailed, consolidated and comprehensive global payroll reporting along with Finance & HR analytics for global & local strategic decision-making. There are thousands of reports available on the global payroll control platform. A key favourite among our global clients is the Audit Workflow report which Nigel demonstrated on screen. This report helps you identify who did what and when. You can compare the last 3 months of a specific payroll or country, or you may compare different payroll countries- this is the kind of audit readiness that can make life a lot easier for payroll teams.
Reconciliation Tool
The reconciliation tool has proved to be a massive hit with our global clients, and we receive a huge amount of positive feedback especially around how it saves them so much time when it comes to this awkward and time-consuming part of payroll. The tool auto-generates a report that can easily compares two different data sets and then flags potential variances & discrepancies. Nigel also pointed out how all this is possible because we have organised your data in a global first way, standardised it across all of your countries and automated the flow. This approach paves the way for the introduction of effective tools like our hugely popular reconciliation solution.
2024 Coming Attractions
Reconciliation Gen 2:
This was a neat handoff to our Head of Product, Daniela who spoke about additional reconciliation tool features you can expect to see on the global payroll control platform in 2024. Gen 2 of the tool will feature new Pay& Tax categories requested by our clients, additional filtering options, a comments section to allow you to explain variances and some functionality that will enable quick and easy sharing of the variance results with local vendors.
Payments:
Dani then spoke about our plans to introduce a new feature that automates international payments to a global workforce. With Workpay, users can initiate payments to global employees in just a few clicks. Payslip can produce a bank file in the format needed by the employer for its chosen bank. This is an automated client bank payment file which can be produced automatically on the platform, once the payroll calculations (GTN) are absorbed and the relevant bank details are added to the system.
Payroll Integrations Control Centre
Dani wrapped up her session with some information on some exciting new platform features that will enable clients to monitor all of the integrations they have activated on the platform.
This includes a real-time global overview across all payrolls & integrations and how the configurations are performing. Users will be able to monitor and manage integrations on payslips & tax documents as well as bi-directional data inputs from HCMs like Workday and SuccessFactors. This is a control centre that offers full visibility and control around exactly what is happening with each integration, each payroll and each country. This offers both a high-level system overview plus the granular details that our clients are telling us they want to see when it comes to integrations as a service functionality.
Fidelma then wrapped up the webinar with a word on a medical technology client of ours who benefited from our IaaS approach. We Integrated data files from 24 sources including ADP flexiforms, removing manual work from 17 different flexiform countries. This saved them two days a month on payroll processing. You can read about it in more detail here. These are the kind of transformative gains and benefits you can expect to enjoy when you come on board the global payroll control platform in 2024!
