National Payroll Week Celebrates Payroll Professionals

National Payroll Week is this week, and created 20 years ago by the American Payroll Association to celebrate “the hard work by America’s 150 million wage earners and the payroll professionals who pay them.” It comes right on the heels of Labor Day, which celebrates American workers and the contributions they make to the strength of our country (current political climate notwithstanding, but we won’t go there).

Payroll professionals work tirelessly to keep the wheels of their company turning daily. Their jobs entail much more than simply cutting paychecks – they process timesheets, keep track of time off, stay on top of labor laws and regulations to ensure compliance (and avoid costly penalties), and so much more. Their job is not an easy one, and with increasing demand to do more work at less cost, comes greater demand for more efficient processes. A 2014 study conducted by The Hackett Group showed that payroll leaders still spent more than 50% of their time on day-to-day payroll activities.

Challenges Payroll Professionals Face

The professionals we talk to every day face a myriad of challenges from a lack of payroll automation processes, particularly when it comes to time collection. These include:

• Chasing after late timesheets
• Correcting bad data or filling in missing data
• Manually entering timesheet data into payroll systems
• Lack of functionality/integrations/flexibility within their payroll system

According to the Hackett Group study, 46% of payroll professionals cited lack of integration and flexibility as a major challenge of their payroll system. In addition, they indicated that business process automation was important, but 77% said that it was not easy in their current system.

The ROI of Automating Payroll Processes

When you think about all the challenges payroll professionals face when it comes to doing their jobs, it all adds up to a lot of time – which adds to the bottom line. The goal is to lower the median cost to produce a paycheck, and inefficient processes due to deficient payroll technology adds to this cost. More importantly, it delays payroll – which means employees don’t get their paychecks on time.

With the right timesheet software that collects time data in one place, automates timesheet collection and validation, and integrates with your payroll system, how much could you be saving?

Stop the insanity – our payroll professionals are worth it! And that’s why we celebrate them this week. Learn more about the benefits of Journyx time tracking solutions for Accounting, Billing, and Payroll here.