Many businesses remain unaware of the benefits of outsourcing payroll. Finance and payroll managers often believe that an in-house team, or one person doing everything, cuts costs and retains control. In reality, it’s likely to end up costing more, slow digital transformation and impact business continuity.

The role of the modern finance leader is much more than just assessing financial performance and monitoring cashflow. Nowadays, a good financial leader takes stock of the whole organisation to make sure every aspect is aligned to business goals.

When it comes to types of fraud, we’re all familiar with insurance, tax and even identity theft, but payroll fraud is often swept under the rug. It’s not one to be ignored, as every year it costs UK businesses £12 billion in loss.

The impact of the global coronavirus pandemic has forced finance leaders to do the impossible; maintain stability in a chaotic environment.

Many UK businesses furloughed their employees to keep paying workers while business was temporarily closed under The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS). The government’s measure helped thousands of businesses to stay afloat, but one issue that continues to perplex people is in relation to employee benefits and salary sacrifice arrangements, such as childcare vouchers and cycle-to-work schemes.

As part of the government’s Plan for Jobs, a new £2 billion Kickstart Scheme is set to create hundreds of thousands of new, fully subsidised jobs for young people across the country.

Launching on the 7th September 2020, National Payroll Week is raising awareness of the impact of payroll and celebrating the hard-working payroll pioneers who keep the UK paid.

How has your payroll operation performed over the last few months? Has it remained a strong and resilient, or has it crumbled under the pressures of the pandemic? Whatever your answer, the origin is often the maturity of your payroll operation.
 

Working smarter, becoming more efficient and driving cost savings are top of the list for most organisations, but many haven’t uncovered the missing link in their strategy: workforce management.

Over the years, I’ve heard many inaccurate, and often amusing, assumptions of what working in HR is like from outside perspectives. One being, “HR sounds like an easy number they just hire and fire people” Fellow HR leaders, does this sound familiar?

Last week I joined Kevin Green, ex HR Director of Royal Mail and Chair Advisory Board at Circal, to discuss how organisations have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and HR’s role within that response. Don’t worry if you missed the webinar, you can watch the full version here.

It’s fair to say that HR and Payroll teams have been tested as the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded. But after several months of firefighting, many organisations recognise that they need to make significant changes to their payroll and HR operations.