Everybody loves getting paid. But why is it that (almost) everybody hates the payroll process?

Firstly, payroll software and the payroll process is hopelessly out of date. Online payslips are still considered a new, new thing in the industry. There are 500 million people on facebook and yet over 95% of the working world can’t get their payslips online! It’s nuts. You can see your friends holiday snaps online. You can file your tax return online. You can bank online. But you can’t see your payslip.

The information exchange process is also hopelessly outdated. Small and medium sized companies still email salary information in Excel to their accountants. Follow up is usually done by phone – I just did it now. It went like this: “Is payroll ready for this month?” “Yes. I’ll email it on shortly.” “Thanks.”

Thanks but why can’t I, as an employer, see the information now and why do I have to phone about it? Why can’t my employees see their payslips online? What if employees want to see their payslips for the past six months? And why can’t employees run a report showing various deductions on their payslips over that period?

It gets even worse with companies operating internationally. There are a handful of companies that can offer truly international payroll processing. Where there’s mystery there’s margin. I recently spoke to a company with 100 international employees scattered around six different countries. They were quoted an annual fee of $60,000, or $50 per employee per month, for payroll processing. That was for the bog standard service!

A small group of international payroll companies have serviced big multinational clients for a long time and it looks like the cow has grown fat. More and more, small and medium sized companies are going global earlier. One of the most essential services they need, payroll, is not being provided at the level of service or the price point they demand.

Quick update – staff just got their payslips. But, one of them went to the wrong email address! And the format is .mht which won’t display on a Mac. Why don’t we have a $%#@ing self service web portal for all this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 26th, 2010 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Payroll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.