Payroll expert Bruce van Wyk on why companies should evaluate their payroll solution provider before renewing their annual licence fee.
Legacy systems, like old habits, die hard. But that shouldn’t be the case. While there are logistics-based reasons for using the system you’ve been using since time immemorial, it’s important to consider whether it is a smart business decision. Despite all of the advantages of moving to a tech-savvy payroll and HR solution, many businesses will still choose to renew their existing annual licence fees because It’s easy to fall back to the mindset that what’s comfortable is safe. Better the devil you know, right? Also, why incur the risk of moving your payroll and HR management solutions when your current solution works just fine? Here are three reasons why.
1 Scalability on tap
Before you renew your current payroll or HR management solution licence, consider the scalability, or lack thereof, you’re locking yourself into for the next year. Think about how quickly your current licence allows you to add or subtract employees or adjust your feature set to downscale or allow for several new hires at a moment’s notice.
There’s a reason pay-as-you-use and other more agile payment plans are gaining traction. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, no business should be forced to pay for employees they no longer have on their payroll. So, before you renew your contract with your current payroll and HR service providers, ask yourself what it means for your business for the next year.
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2 There are better solutions out there… in the cloud
If there’s any reason to move away from legacy payroll platforms, it’s that the alternatives may offer cost, compliance and productivity advantages. Cloud payroll and HR solutions, for example, offer a vast array of benefits over legacy ones. The best cloud solutions are always up to date, meaning virtually zero lag between when changes are required by tax law or legislative regulation and when they take effect on the platform. Security, feature and maintenance updates also take place for all users (and clients) simultaneously, which isn’t just a time saver but also means you can reduce the burden on your internal IT resources. If that’s not enough to encourage businesses to make the move, an added benefit is that cloud platforms don’t require installation. Instead, they work on any device with an internet connection and are accessible both from the office and on the move.
3 The largest organisations are migrating
No one’s denying the potentially hefty financial and logistical requirements involved in moving from one payroll management solution to another, but consider this: if some of the world’s largest organisations have made the change in spite of the logistics, surely the advantages must be worthwhile? They’ve clearly weighed up the benefits and perhaps you should too.
Any business owner or executive worth their salt should pursue any means of reducing hinderances to growth, like excessive costs and downtime. Businesses, particularly multinational organisations, must also navigate a miasma of regulatory and financial complexity - problems that cloud platforms solve with relatively little effort.
Bruce is one of the founding members and the managing director of cloud-based HR and Payroll solution PaySpace. He has 16 years of experience in designing, conceptualising and implementing functional payroll and HR solutions for various local, multinational and blue-chip organisations.
