Outsourcing and fully managed payroll services are essentially two names for the same thing and are often used interchangeably to describe the process by which an external specialist manages your business payroll functions.
An important difference between the two is that outsourcing sometimes suggests the ability to offload the larger, more demanding responsibilities to a third party, while keeping others in-house.
It is possible to keep some payroll tasks in-house, especially if the desire is to retain control over certain data or processes. But as with most things, outsourcing works best when a single entity has full responsibility for completing a task.
The difference between a fully managed payroll service and simply ‘outsourcing’ is in finding a group of professionals with good processes that can overcome any obstacle, and a third party that is allowed to do some payroll tasks but lacks access to other parts of the process.
A fully managed payroll service performs all the tedious — and complicated — work of running payroll checks, processing direct deposits and maintaining employee pay details. Payroll services can save you time and money, ensuring your employees are paid correctly while helping ensure they have adequate taxes withheld. No matter how large or small the business, specialist payroll services can alleviate a lot of pain.
The cost of payroll services depends on several factors: the number of employees, the number of pay periods every month, and the level of service required.
Employee self-service
A professional payroll services company offers your organisation a single point of management for payroll processes. They often use the most advanced technologies such as RPA (robotic process automation), artificial intelligence, data analytics and IoT (Internet of Things) to manage their processes.
Most fully managed payroll providers will supply employees with a self-service portal which allows them to manage leave, review or print payslips, check their personal data, and make service requests from anywhere.
If control over sensitive employee data is a concern, in both partial and fully managed outsourced payroll services, you can still oversee some things. For example, you can verify if certain statutory requirements are being met, and check if payments and reports are getting done on time.
A holistic payroll system provided by a fully managed service also takes care of employee record-keeping functions by using cutting-edge, cloud-based systems. An advanced cloud payroll system enables companies to pay salaries on time to each employee — regardless of their location.
Why choose a fully managed payroll service?
The biggest advantage of a fully managed payroll service is that it helps reduce the pressure on managers, allowing them to make better use of their time in more productive parts of the business.
For over thirty years, Affinity has been a trusted partner for mid-market and enterprise businesses in Australia and New Zealand, empowering them to transform their payroll operations. With a focus on turning payroll from a cost into an asset, we have established ourselves as industry leaders in delivering innovative cloud-based payroll software and exceptional payroll services.
