AI in payroll: Empowering teams and employees 

The advancement of AI in payroll has multiple benefits for organisations, employees, and payroll professionals. It’s a helping hand that supports human expertise, helping everyone achieve more.

In this blog

Why payroll is a top priority

Powering exceptional employee experiences

Financial literacy that fuels peace of mind

How AI in payroll helps teams do better 

Conclusion and key takeaways

Why payroll is a top priority

There’s no shortage of research confirming that pay is one of the biggest items on the employee agenda right now. Making sure employees are paid accurately and on-time is vital for attracting and retaining the best talent. Reducing payroll errors is especially vital a time when people are struggling with their financial wellbeing.  

AI-enabled payroll paves the way for enhanced self-service, quicker payroll processing, greater accuracy, and improved compliance. Let’s explore the various benefits that employees and payroll teams stand to gain as adoption gathers pace. 

Powering exceptional employee experiences 

AI adds a whole new level of intelligence (and potential) to modern payroll technology, unlocking personalised consumer-grade experiences similar to mobile banking apps. As part of this, it will be easier than ever for employees to view and track exactly when and how much they will be paid. 

The entire workforce will benefit from this increased autonomy and efficiency. It’s especially valuable for providing pay transparency for employees whose pay varies each month (like frontline shift workers). 

Financial literacy that fuels peace of mind 

Going beyond this, AI can also help employees to better understand their pay and benefits. Interactive payslips and technology can enable employees to access an explanation for every element of their payslip, whether it’s net versus gross pay, National Insurance contributions, student loan repayments, tax codes, or pension contributions.   

This knowledge is empowering because nearly 80% of UK employees don’t fully understand their payslips. AI has the potential to drastically reduce this figure and increase financial literacy across the board.   

Even though employers can’t control external sources of stress, they can support their employees with the right financial wellbeing tools to improve money literacy, encourage saving, and provide flexibility. 

How AI in payroll helps teams do better 

The other beneficiary here is, of course, the payroll department. AI can act as a virtual assistant to your teams, reducing admin, improving accuracy, and strengthening compliance.  

The rise of AI into payroll operations, organisations can expect three core benefits: assistance, accuracy, and assurance. 

1. Assistance

AI integrations and chatbots can help deal with common employee payroll queries, delivering significant time and cost savings for the payroll team.  

AI provides further assistance by automating data entry and reducing the administrative burden that prevents payroll teams from spending more time on strategic initiatives. The upshot? Better experiences across the board, and more efficient operations that feed directly into the business bottom line.

2. Accuracy

Payroll mistakes are rare, but even one error in a workforce of 10,000 is still one too many. This is where AI-enabled anomaly detection can help payroll teams to reduce the element of human chance and catch errors early in the payroll cycle. This extra attention to detail marks the dawn of a new era in accuracy terms. 

3. Assurance

Adding to the pressure on payroll teams is the complexity that comes with legislative change and the need to remain 100% compliant. That’s no mean feat but AI is expected to play an increasing role in these terms too.   

Payroll teams frequently encounter legislative changes relating, for example, to National Minimum Wage, National Insurance, or pension contributions. These adjustments add to the workload and create complexity.  

By leveraging new technologies to automate these changes in line with all necessary rules and regulations, payroll managers can better handle compliance. More than just reducing workload, this automation will deliver priceless peace of mind for payroll professionals. 

Conclusion: The case for AI in payroll

Considering the multiple benefits on offer, the case for AI in payroll is a strong one.  

For employees, it provides greater empowerment, better employee experience, and improved financial wellbeing.  

For payroll teams who work so hard to achieve top accuracy and compliance, it offers a helping hand in stressful times.  

And for organisations and leaders, it delivers unprecedented efficiency and productivity gains, along with all-important peace of mind on the compliance front. 

Key takeaways

• AI transforms payroll into a consumer-grade experience with improved pay transparency and self-service options. 
• The technology helps tackles poor financial literacy by making payslips more understandable for employees. 
• Payroll teams benefit from automated tasks and error detection, freeing them for strategic work. 
• Compliance updates help to reduce complexity and mitigate risk in payroll operations, providing peace of mind for payroll professionals and organisational leaders. 

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