Leveraging SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll to Reap the Benefits of Continuous Payroll

In our earlier post, How SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and Payroll Ease Compliance Burdens and Simplify Core Processes [include link], we focused on the increasing complexity of global compliance facing HR and how SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central (Core HR) and Employee Central Payroll use localization to lessen the burden of varying regulations globally. We introduced Employee Central and the ways in which it helps to simplify processes, from updating profile information to managing a team. All of the capabilities of Employee Central tie into the Payroll piece as well. So, let's turn our attention to the significance of Employee Central Payroll to transform your organization's payroll process.

The Shift from Traditional to Continuous Payroll

If we look at a typical breakdown of duties for most payroll processes, about 70% of payroll is actually happening in HR where the data lives. The last 30% is made up of calculating, paying, and pushing all of that data to accounting.

Employee Central Payroll has moved away from the traditional model of payroll to a continuous payroll cycle to help eliminate the burden on payroll departments. And this all starts with the Payroll Control Center—one tool to preview process and watch a payroll from the start of the cycle to the end of the period.

During the cycle, you're made aware of alerts, KPIs (key performance indicators), and different metrics surrounding that particular cycle, even if you have more than one cycle going at a time as many organizations do. The Payroll Control Center allows you to define your processes and put simple steps in place to walk you through the start of a cycle, monitor the progress, and finalize payroll when ready.

Benefits of Continuous Payroll

Visibility Simplifies the Process

In a traditional payroll organization, you're forced to run far more off cycles than necessary, due to the lack of visibility. This typically translates to a considerable time window to process payroll, a poor employee experience, and a high level of stress for your payroll department.

With continuous payroll, you have transparency throughout the process, allowing you to cut it closer to the day when payments need to be made. The actual steps to complete payroll are more of a formality and far less stressful. After payroll is complete, you can still process off-cycle payments, but they're going to be the exceptions, such as employees forgetting to enter their time but needing to get paid.

Effective-Dated System Facilitates Retroactive Pay

Another benefit of Employee Central Payroll is the straightforward way to do a retro pay. If you have ever processed a pay raise that is two months past due for an hourly employee who also has overtime, you understand the beauty of an entire system that is effective dated. When you put in an effective date with the last pay increase, to use this example, the system does all of the calculations for you—not only the hourly employee's base hours, but also the overtime hours.

KPIs, Metrics, and Alerts Provide Much-Needed Insights

If you've ever struggled reviewing spreadsheets with a highlighter in hand—searching for what exactly happened during a pay cycle to cause such a big difference in payroll—you'll appreciate having much-needed insight all along the way. Continuous payroll allows you to start the cycle and monitor as data changes during the cycle—new hires, terms, transfers—all of it reflected in the KPIs, metrics, and alerts throughout, until you are ready to move to the next step in your Payroll Control Center.

Clear Recordkeeping for Compliance

Employee Central Payroll allows for notes and attachments right into the payroll cycle that can be reported on and included in an audit trail. This means that you will always have the records reflecting what did or did not happen, with full transparency.

With Employee Central Payroll, Payroll and HR are working together with one system of record, reducing time spent reconciling, auditing, processing, and doing data entry. The single global Payroll system is complete with alerts, KPIs and monitoring—operating as a continuous payroll system with notes and notifications throughout for clear and complete recordkeeping.

Illumiti and SAP SuccessFactors

As an SAP Platinum Partner, Illumiti is an integration and management consultancy specializing in SAP product suites, providing start to finish implementation and ongoing maintenance and support. Learn how we bring together proven human resource consulting with SAP SuccessFactors implementation expertise so that your organization can reap the benefits of continuous payroll: https://illumiti.com/solutions/sap-successfactors/