How payroll shared services directors can maintain efficiency and compliance

Key to the role of HR and payroll shared services directors is to keep the payroll function operating in an accurate, efficient, timely, and compliant fashion.

Challenges to hitting this goal every month can be numerous. For example, vital data, such as finalised employee attendance figures and monthly commission payments, often comes in late, pushing cut-off dates to the limit. Complex scenarios, such as late starters or missed overtime, don’t help matters either.

Better technology can make a real difference. For example, Microsoft’s Power Automate (PA) process automation platform has now been integrated with the Zellis Intelligence Platform (ZIP). ZIP integrates data from both the Zellis HCM Cloud and third-party applications into a single datastore.

As a result, it is now possible for payroll teams to quickly and easily create their own workflows. Doing so enables them to automate everyday processes and tasks, such as alerting colleagues when information is due.

This approach does more than just improve payroll efficiency. When combined with dashboards and other data visualisation tools, it also enables you to move beyond basic data analysis activities to identify further areas for improvement within your payroll operations. This is because such insights provide the evidence needed to take action and fix the situation.

Key skills payroll shared services directors need in their team

Just as important as technology is ensuring you have the right trained and qualified team in place to provide an optimal service at all times. Key to getting this right is the payroll manager. The challenge is that a person in this role needs to demonstrate a broad and complex range of skills that can be difficult to find in one individual.

Such expertise includes technical proficiency in payroll systems, regulatory and compliance knowledge, and strategic financial and project management. On the soft skills side, payroll managers must also be able to demonstrate effective communication and interpersonal, problem-solving, and change management capabilities.

Unfortunately, there is a skills shortage of payroll professionals in general, and payroll managers in particular.

Some organisations choose to work with a managed payroll services provider. At Zellis, this option gives you access to our dedicated teams of rigorously trained and qualified payroll and HR experts. Team members continually develop their skills and knowledge with dedicated training on a regular basis.

How to optimise payroll quality

Our skilled professionals can offer payroll shared service directors an optimised, high-quality service all year round. With centres of excellence in the UK, Ireland, and India, we also provide an optimal combination of onshore and offshore services, catering to the needs of 600,000 employees around the world.

In other words, the size and scale of our managed services division is such that a resilient, secure, and cost-effective approach comes as standard. On the one hand, we have cut costly management overheads and ensured our processes avoid unnecessary and inefficient downtime.

Zellis’ managed payroll service is underpinned by our own award-winning HMRC-approved payroll software. It harnesses the latest developments in cloud, automation, data, and AI to boost process efficiency, agility, and accuracy, while minimising compliance risk.

So that you can see concrete evidence of all these positives for yourself, we use key performance indicators to track payroll performance and identify suitable benchmarks for comparison.

Interested in enhancing your payroll operations?

Discover our tech-enabled managed payroll services and how to transform payroll efficiency.