The complexity of modern business – and modern payroll – are making manual payroll processes a bigger burden than they’ve ever been before, especially post-pandemic.

It takes a large amount of time, effort, and human resource to ensure that payroll runs on time and accurately every month, especially if many of the processes involved are still paper-based rather than in the cloud.

These issues can have consequences that spread beyond payroll, even as far as a business’s bottom line. As well as meaning payroll can’t meet the needs of the business it serves, it can impact employee engagement, wellbeing, and work-life balance, and lead to non-compliance if errors are made. And while some business leaders and organizations turn to outsourced third-party service providers to assist them, if not handled correctly this can lead to security issues regarding the storage of sensitive data.

Part of the solution is to embrace automation and innovative payroll technology – but that isn’t the whole story. In this blog, we’ll explore the concept of the modern pay experience, and how it can transform payroll into an asset that supports employees, other departments, and organizations as a whole.

What is the modern pay experience?

The modern pay experience is the concept of making global payroll fast, flexible, and certain, transforming it into a key strategic function within businesses. Instead of merely being a siloed, functional operation, payroll should instead be considered a means of driving business advantage, both through payroll performance and insights about everything from company culture to company structure that can be derived from its data.

A key part of the modern pay experience is unifying the data and processes of payroll, finance and HR into a single cloud-based ecosystem that can cut several days off each payroll cycle, while simultaneously improving payroll accuracy and consistency. This is supported by fast and friction-free pay processes, modular and flexible services that can be deployed locally or globally, and reliable end-to-end compliance through automation and analytics.

Ultimately, thanks to the modern pay experience, what used to be relatively mundane admin work can become an organization’s secret weapon, fit increasing customer experience and employee experience expectations, and ultimately, a fast-changing business world.

How can the modern pay experience turn employee pay into business advantage?

With a properly implemented modern pay experience, the feelgood factor can quickly spread throughout an organization and make a real difference in a number of different departments. But there are three that will enjoy the biggest benefits: payroll, finance and human resources.

Payroll

A combination of innovative technologies, a single global platform, and territory-specific knowledge can come together to deliver accurate, timely, compliant payroll in every single cycle. They can reduce friction in both payroll and payments processing by ensuring the same cloud-based global pay solution is applied in every country a business operates in.

Standardization, automation, real-time reporting, and dashboarding help improve the effectiveness of payroll operations, deliver total global visibility into payroll performance, and maintain compliance with regulations in every territory. And the ability to integrate Local Payroll Information (LPI) can further improve the accuracy, speed and consistency of salary payments.

Finance

The modern pay experience makes it far easier to manage cash flow and track salary payments through speed, flexibility, and real-time visibility of the payroll and payments process.

The ability to choose from a wider range of funding and pay options, including instant salary payments, can save several days of processing in each payment cycle. Reducing the number of touchpoints with the corporate banking system minimizes the risk of incorrect payments or delays, while the ability to get funding to suit every country and currency reduces the costs of foreign exchange.

HR

By delivering pay services that work much better for employees, workforce engagement and motivation can be improved, and top talent acquisition and employee retention can be bolstered. From instant salary payments to the ultimate flexibility of on-demand pay, employees’ experience with payroll can be transformed to decrease employee turnover, without adding administrative burden to any department. 

This can be taken even further if the payroll platform can be integrated with leading Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions such as Workday and HiBob. That way, all employee data – and insights – can be brought together in one place, across full-time employees, temporary staff, contractors, and even gig workers.

In summary

The modern pay experience has the power to transform the way that businesses operate, and drive genuine competitive advantage through agility, flexibility and employee satisfaction.

CloudPay is your perfect partner to help you make this a reality, as we have the only truly end-to-end global solution that encompasses payroll, funding, and payments. Our single, global cloud-based platform can be deployed across every territory you operate in, so that you can pay every employee on time, every time. We can help you unify all your teams and processes around the globe, accelerate your payments from days to seconds, and gain global visibility and control over your processes.

Our experts have 25 years of experience, and we handle more than a million payslips every year for more than 2000 businesses in 130 countries. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you revolutionize your approach to pay.