‘AI’ Payroll Pioneers with a Human Touch

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way we do business and payroll services should be at the forefront of these advances. In addition to the transactional processing involved with payroll, over the last few years we have had real time information (RTI) reporting, automatic enrolment, gender pay gap reporting, apprenticeship levy and of course most recently the revised data protection regulations (GDPR), to name but a few pieces of legislation; all now viewed by payroll professionals as ‘business as usual’.  My question is where is, or where should, payroll sit within a business in the future?

Here at Armstrong Watson, with a large compliment of people within the payroll service who are qualified, or working towards their professional qualifications, we believe payroll is becoming much more than just “transactional” processing.  It should be at the forefront within any business, not only as it is likely to be one of the largest overheads, but with compliance getting more and more complicated the financial and reputational risks can be high.

There are now additional services payroll provides such as salary sacrifice schemes, payrolling of benefits in kind and exception reporting such as checking National Minimum Wage but, what more can be offered to help businesses?  Payroll data is valuable, but is your business utilising it?  

Here at Armstrong Watson, we have a payroll leadership team constantly looking at innovation within our service, but also within our industry.  With the Gig Economy, will the standard payroll process remain?  Or instead will we have industry sectors that have permanent movement of people.  Imagine an internet dashboard, UK wide, with a list of roles needing filled the next day, or even that day, perhaps due to unexpected absence.  Now imagine a generation of people who decide they don’t want a career in a particular company, instead they want to choose when they work and where they work on a daily or other basis.  They look at the dashboard and decide where they want to be, sign up, provide their details and they turn up.  Of course they will expect payment at the end of their shift so do we now have payroll on the go? What’s next!?!