Give people access to exactly what they need when they need it – nothing more, nothing less.
Take a traditional relationship between a payroll bureau team and their customers, where the process of running each company’s payroll uses a whole heap of disparate technology and disconnected process management tools.
There’s email, there are password protected files and cloud file transfer tools and then there’s the payroll processing software itself. Sometimes there’s a workflow management tool, which needs to get updated manually when a process step or task has been performed. There are excel spreadsheets and there are good old fashioned bits of paper and phone calls.
Then you stop and think about the repetition of tasks and questionable data security when moving data around. Uploads, downloads, rekeying data, double and triple checking and multiple versions of files. Everyone, mainly the bureau team, needing to be super-organised and have a massive amount of attention to detail to stop errors creeping in. Of course, a bureau’s reputation hangs on its ability to get its customers teams’ paid correctly and on time. And with GDPR and the potential for data breaches rising to the top of everyone risk agenda, it really is time to move all of this onto a more efficient and secure footing.
At Paycircle we’ve known this from the beginning. We built Paycircle to be collaborative, efficient and secure from the get-go. What we also realised was that different ‘actors’ in the process have different needs and requirements and that they should all have access to exactly what they need, when they need it – nothing more and nothing less.
To get everyone up and running in this wonderful new way of working, we’ve built Paycircle to be customisable, depending upon who’s logging in, how ‘au-fait’ they are with payroll and payroll data and what tasks they’re looking to complete. We’ve built, what we refer to as, ‘Roles’ and ‘Permissions’ to support true payroll collaboration in the cloud.
Rock n’ roll payroll ‘Roles’
From ‘Bureau Super-Admin’ all the way to ‘Employer Lite’, there’s a ‘Role’ for all contributors and interested parties in the payroll process.
Each ‘Role’ gets a payroll portal that’s configured exclusively for their needs. For example, ‘HR’ can access the ‘Team’ and make updates to team records but they can’t see or do anything else – unless their ‘Permissions’ have been changed. ‘Finance’ can access payroll reports and journals after the payroll has been processed – this could also be an external accountant or pension manager. And a ‘Company administrator’ can have as much or as little access to all or any of the payroll features as is appropriate. Each ‘Role’ has an assigned set of permissions that can then be tweaked on an individual basis.
The ‘Employer Lite’ role is a little bit unique, in as much as, it’s been designed to work perfectly as a great introduction to teams who are collaborating online for the first time.
Getting started with ‘Employer-Lite’
A bureau can kick-off working collaboratively in the cloud with their customers by assigning them the ‘Employer-Lite’ role and inviting them to register for their new payroll portal. Once they’ve registered, they’ll have access to their own payroll portal, where they can perform the tasks and access the information they need throughout the payroll process. The portal is linked to a basic ‘workflow’ manager, which is set by the bureau and at each stage in the process the employer receives automated instructions and reminders regarding the payroll process. All interaction then happens via the portal. All data exchanges, instructions and conversations relating to the payroll all go on online and in real-time.
The benefit of starting out this way is that it’s obvious, straight away, to all involved that running payroll collaboratively, online is more effective, efficient, structured, intuitive and secure than anything they’ve been involved with previously.
It’s ground-breaking stuff and produces immediate and obvious benefits for everyone involved.
Gloriously granular ‘Permissions’
Paycircle’s ‘Roles’ get the ball rolling. The ‘Permissions’ functionality then takes everything to a whole new level. The ‘Super Administrator’ or account owner can fiddle with all the levers and give people granular level access to their payroll portal.
You can select a ‘Role’ based upon the ‘type’ of access that a person requires, then, you can go a stage further and decide exactly which additional areas of the system they can access and then edit.
What’s even more interesting is that you can reveal areas of the system to people at the rate at which they can handle being exposed to it. It can be revealed in big chunks or gently over time.
Author: Catherine Pinkney