Automating the Payroll Process

Payroll is a vital process within every business. Employees need to be paid accurately and on time, therefore any issues or delays with this can result in serious personal and business disruption. However, payroll processing can be a long and often painstaking task for employees, by automating the process you can increase accuracy and save valuable employee time which could be utilised for higher-value tasks.

48% of respondents that use next-gen technologies indicate they use it for automating manual processes including payroll processing automation. This allows for a significant increase in payroll compliance and efficiency (Deloitte, Global Payroll Benchmarking Survey).

In this article we showcase the business benefits of payroll automation through a real-life use case:

Challenge

A customer-provided external payroll processing for several customers, utilising a manual and error-prone process to deliver this service to their customers. ​

The process included manual checking, validation, and workflow for payroll teams. ​

The customer was dealing with an insecure process that was prone to security issues where information was shared with unauthorised people.

Solution

​We developed an automated solution utilising Microsoft Power Platform, Azure Functions, and SharePoint. The process is fully re-usable and utilises core components from Microsoft’s solutions. ​

The solution consisted of the following elements:​

• Automated extraction of files from folders, where they were decrypted using secure keys stored in key vault​
• Decompression and automatic validation of details within the documents​
• Through Power Automate, documents were routed to the correct secure SharePoint portal​
• Secure SharePoint portal, with named user access to ensure documents were not accessed by unapproved users. ​

Outcome / Benefits

1. Improved Payroll processing productivity
2. Secure process for handling sensitive payroll data
3. Re-useable process, using core Microsoft components

Conclusion

Automating the payroll process can make it a much simpler and more streamlined task for the business and for employees. Moving to the automated process increases accuracy by removing the scope for human error and frees up staff time to focus on more high-value and interesting work.