According to APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking database, organizations in the 25th percentile process payroll in three days or less, organizations at the median take five days, and those in the 75th percentile take seven days or more. There are plenty of reasons why it might take a company a few more days to complete payroll — from the technology tools it uses to how it sets up and schedules the process. 

However, these reasons do not negate the importance of both internal and external benchmarking. Especially in a large company with dozens or even hundreds of employees that work on payroll, cutting down cycle times by even a day can free up employees to focus on more value-added activities or allow the company to re-skill and redeploy employees elsewhere. Companies that have implemented automated solutions for payroll processing have seen their costs go down, employee productivity increase, and the number of errors decreases drastically.

Optimizing and streamlining manual parts of the payroll process can help ensure that payroll staff doesn’t have to spend time chasing down employees for their timesheets. Added efficiencies might also deliver savings on overhead costs and allow the CFO to move finance talent to other parts of the organization. 

Many companies have already digitized, automated, and outsourced at least parts of their payroll process. You’re probably even one of them. But there may still be parts of your company’s process where an employee has to physically do something to add data to the process or move it through an electronic workflow. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can optimize your payroll processes with Paylocity to save on your manpower and resources while keeping your employees happy, I’d be happy to set up a free demo with you. Just click leave a message here and I’ll get right back to you.