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With the new year comes the energy and excitement of a fresh start. You’re not alone in feeling a renewed sense of excitement for the road ahead. But spending 21 days per year on payroll processing and administration can get in the way of those new year’s resolutions.
If you’ve already outsourced the work to a third-party provider, congratulations. You’ve likely clawed back a good chunk of time. Question is, is it enough time? Did you find the right payroll provider. Lift HCM has been helping businesses with human capital management since 1967. We’ll walk through the signs it’s time to find a new partner to process your payroll.
1. You Struggle to Onboard New Employees to Your Payroll
6% of US adults didn’t have an open checking or savings account at a bank or credit union as of 2022. There are varying reasons for this and it’s a problem that impacts some industries more than others, but it goes to show there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for paying your employees.
If you’re stuck doing the heavy lifting after your payroll provider has exhausted their options for accommodating employees’ financial restrictions, it may be time to make the switch. Your new provider may offer pay cards, print paper checks, or offer other means of accommodating your employees. They may also have more options for onboarding them smoothly to your payroll.
2. Your Data Doesn’t Communicate With Accountants and Benefits Managers
Most payroll providers license out a software platform which acts as your portal for viewing and managing payroll data. If your payroll provider doesn’t have a license for this type of software, there’s a good chance they’re using proprietary tools. Ideally, that platform communicates with the tools preferred by your accountant and benefits manager.
If it doesn’t, you’ll have to manually provide third-party partners with incompatible software the information they need to account for changes in your workforce, adjust their services, monitor compliance, generate reports, or cooperate with audits and inspections.
You could alternatively grant your accountant or benefits manager access to export the data themselves (they’ll be thrilled about it). Both options+ steal time away from both service providers and your company’s leadership. If you’re spending time worrying about either, it might be time for a change.
Your payroll provider should be Johnny-on-the-spot with options for building a custom integration or (as will more likely be the case) streamline the passage of data between parties with any number of automations and data parsing tools. Absence of a through, proactive response brings us to the next item on our list.
3. Your Payroll Provider Isn’t Invested in the Partnership
Managed payroll is, first and foremost, a partnership; one that is strengthened with time and care. It’s staying on the phone that extra five minutes asking how your daughter’s volleyball tournament went. It’s following up with you on objectives and challenges. It’s not uncommon for the services of quality provider to shift and change over time; not just keeping pace as you grow, but evolving to adapt to your unique needs.
And let’s be specific about what we’re talking about, here, because let’s not pretend the words “your unique needs” aren’t locked and loaded in ten million email templates at this exact moment. We’re not talking about needs that are unique to your business that you then explicitly communicate to your payroll provider. These are the needs you mutually identify after reaching a moment of epiphany or realization in an ongoing broader dialog.
These are the needs you didn’t know you needed.
You should see if your therapist does payroll…just a thought.
In other words, an effective, attentive, and invested payroll partner is going to find solutions you didn’t know existed for problems you had yet to successfully articulate. A true partner in payroll administration is going to look out for you and the best interests of your business proactively and enthusiastically. They care about the success they bring you over any opportunity to upsell or meet KPIs you deliver them.
4. Your Payroll Provider Fails as an Educator
Another sign it may be time to switch up your payroll is if your current provider fails in their role as an educator. The ideal provider should ensure your company’s leadership is not only aware of key action items keeping you compliant but that they have a solid grasp of the context surrounding why certain regulatory changes are being made and how they can anticipate it to affect your industry.
They should be doing this even when there’s nothing to sell. It’s easy to see why providers would jump on topics like claiming Work Opportunity Tax Credits; a service which had become so aggressively monetized and marketed that the IRS ordered an immediate stoppage of new claims due to receiving $8 billion dollars of suspected fraudulent claims.
On the other hand, while topics like Illinois’ new Paid Leave for All Workers Act (PLAWA) may require time-intensive changes to clients’ payroll and benefits structure, there’s not much in it for the payroll manager who assumed responsibility for guiding the process as part of their duty to maintain your compliance. A provider who does not throw themselves equally into this work as they do the more profitable responsibilities of their role is not truly invested in your success.
Take the First Steps in Switching to a New Payroll Provider
If any of the four warning signs put a knot in your stomach, then we’ll cleanse your palette with this food for thought…
If you want to see your business achieve its goals in 2024 and your payroll manager isn’t delivering the quality of service your people deserve, then why not chase your New Year’s resolutions with a provider that’s committed to helping you cross each finish line?
Lift HCM knows a thing or two about treating clients like our own flesh and blood. As a family-owned provider of human capital management services, we’ve been helping businesses like yours pay their teams for three generations and counting. If you’re ready to get a strong start to the new year, we’re ready to help you hit the ground running.
