Need for Strong Data Infrastructure in Payroll Software

During the era of the great resignation, HR and payroll software professionals must not be excluded from hybrid and remote work models. This becomes even more glaring when 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full-time.

Providing employees with the perks of working remotely is a must in today’s workforce, which means including payroll processes in your company’s digital transformation is critical.  The benefits of transforming payroll through technology are becoming increasingly clear and interest in cloud payroll systems continues to grow, with 40% of companies saying that they will modernize their payroll systems by 2023. But beyond performing all relevant calculations, creating all needed reports, having the flexibility to manage multiple all the different types of employees and their wages and sharing vital information across the varying programs, companies need to make sure that these systems come with a strong data infrastructure.

What is data infrastructure?

Data infrastructure is a broad concept that encompasses processes, policies, storage, server and data security. Overall, data infrastructure is what preps your data to provide valuable insights for data analysis.

Why does it matter?

With a strong data infrastructure strategy within your payroll software, your company can gain:

• Enhanced productivity and efficiency
• Maximized financial visibility
• Simple collaboration
• Reduced operational costs
• More focus on core operations

Luckily, systems with strong data infrastructure are available that help you to grow your business with your data volume.

Here are five needs when implementing the right data infrastructure:

1. Provides security: When dealing with sensitive business data, you want peace of mind that your data is protected with a robust security management infrastructure that provides critical security and compliance capabilities. When using a cloud-based payroll software, you also want to make sure your company’s information is secured when the application closes, so your data needs to be stored in highly secure, state-of-the-art data centers. Your payroll software should reside on a cloud model that handles security from user authentication to authorization.

2. Avoid errors: When your data sets are filled with inconsistencies, redundancies, inaccuracies, or other issues, you can’t use your data effectively. This also accrues unnecessary costs — the IRS reported about $6 billion in penalties for miscalculating or missing payments in 2020 alone. Use a payroll system that incorporates strong data quality tools as part of your payroll workflow. This cleans up data sets and flags any potential errors to avoid costly fines.

3. Utilizes a data warehouse: Quit wasting time manually blending data. Your payroll system should consolidate into a data warehouse to enhance overall efficiency and proficiency. A payroll system with a strong data infrastructure provides easy access to both current and historical data for reporting and analysis.

4. Incorporates analytics: A payroll system that doesn’t incorporate a business intelligence (BI) platform makes it harder to gain financial visibility. Data infrastructures that incorporate BI solutions make it easier to extract and display vital payroll information for everyone in the company to access and analyze.

5. Ensures easy access: It doesn’t matter how organized and accurate your payroll information is if the folks who need to access payroll reporting can’t retrieve the data. When migrating to the cloud, your payroll system needs to have a data infrastructure where users can utilize their credentials to access specific records and field level access — wherever they are.

Utilize partners that help: CEM Business solutions can help your business migrate to the cloud to adapt for future innovations and the new remote and hybrid work models. We help you run your entire business through predictive, AI-driven insights for better results and happy employees.