Bot to the rescue of the stressed Pay-roll administrator

Reduce errors, respond to change requests quicker and speed up processing time

Key Points: Bot can ease the Pay-roll administrator’s stress in delivering the process within timelines and with quality of output. An iterative process, like what a Pay-roll administrator follows to validate time record, load earnings, deductions, and benefits administration, everything can be programmed in a Bot. Although, the Bot is not a substitute for a pay-roll calculation engine, the automation of pay-roll process with Bots helps pay-roll administrators become true strategic advisors from task-driven professionals.

Setting the Context: Every Pay-Roll administrator’s challenge: “Run pillar to post at the month-end across departments, trying to keep cumbersome spreadsheets up-to-date until the pay-out disbursal”. In a multi-site organization, the pay-roll management software allows import of data from multiple formats and legacy systems, however the pay-roll administrator needs to manually perform the exchange of files between HR & Finance, export data in different formats and await information updates. Also in a multi-site organization, the pay-roll administrator must ensure the integration into a single pay-roll framework from all the site-specific HR applications and give access of data to the authorized personnel.

Net Result: Most repetitive process month-on-month with monotonous HR tasks that involve massive amount of data exchange between applications, departments, and approval authorities, with very short cycle-time to process and non-negotiable timelines for disbursals, that often lead to multiple errors.

So, what is the use case for a BOT in pay-roll administration? Especially for an error free processing within timelines? Can a BOT really make the Pay-roll administrator’s life easy? Are companies using these? To what purpose and with what effect? Perhaps, these are some of the questions that you should think through before deploying a BOT or 4 more to help your pay-roll processing administrator. Again, the moot point would be reduced costs with deploying these BOTs or increase efficiencies of your pay-roll administrator’s deliverables by paring the person with intelligent automation.

An interesting use case: Use a BOT to handle Pay-roll administration and bring in new efficiencies!
There is no single pay-roll software that fits all organizations having single and or multi-site operations! Each of them has different pay-roll framework based on the local laws, policies, taxes, and application engines that run to calculate the same. Time & motion study of a pay-roll administrator shows that it takes about 8 hours to couple of days to complete a thorough streamlining of data collection, acceleration of data access, bringing in data validation accuracy and task handling activities; this typically involves about 5 different set of stakeholders, with each taking atleast around 2 hours to get data authorized.

A leading international bank has adopted RPA in payroll/payments to reduce manual errors by 84 percent, in addition to a 70 percent uptick in productivity. This is in line with EY’s prediction that RPA can unlock up to 35% in potential savings. Many of these requirements can easily be met by a Bot that is developed based on the iterative process being done by the Pay-roll administrator.

Imagine a Bot that can investigate and process your employee attendance, reimbursements, expenses, incentives, bonuses, increments, allowances, deductions/taxes, and finalize the monthly compensation, using your pay-roll administrator’s access to process the data that can meet your pay-roll framework. Wouldn’t it make your pay-roll administrator’s life much easier? While interpretation and decision making on the other hand remain under the ambit of pay-roll administrator.

If you are interested in knowing more about, how TBL can help you deploy such a BOT for your pay-roll process, do drop in a line to: rajaniguntur@thebusinesslabs.com