How Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Is Revolutionizing The Traditional Payroll Software Systems?

Today’s business environment is quite challenging. It’s cruel battle of titans out there. You have to elbow your business through the crowd of competition to stand out. One of the clever hacks businesses are resorting to is by automating different repetitive tasks to help cutdown the cost of running the business.RPA-enabled HR payroll software is one of the promising and disruptive technologies that promise to cut down costs and improve efficiency in payroll processing.

Robotic Process Automation

What is Robotic Process Automation?

According to the Institute for Robotic Process Automation, RPA is simply computer software that is configured to “capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems.” In other words, RPA-enabled payroll software uses “different software agents” in a HRpayroll system to execute different business processes that are normally performed by human beings.

To achieve the benefits of this technology, businesses need to apply RPA to processes that are usually rule-based, repetitive and liable to human error. Since most organization heavily rely on outdated legacy global payroll processing software, it makes payroll processing a perfect place to start when it comes to implementation of this technology.

RPA and payroll processing

Of all human resource process, payroll takes up one of the greatest amount of administrative activity. Every pay cycle demands timeliness, accuracy and well-planned coordination across different organizational departments and entities. And given that global payroll is heavily governed by various fiscal and statutory regulations, there needs to be a raft of internal guidelines put in place to ensure effective payroll processing.

You don’t want to make wrong deductions, frustrate the people that work for you or flout statutory regulations. You know all what it means – financially speaking. Thankfully, RPA-enabled payroll software technology is coming in to help HR cut the cost of payroll processing. It also helps businesses improve payroll processing consistence and efficiency.

What makes RPA great technology for payroll processing?

  • Rhymes with the nature of payroll processing – Payroll processing is a highly repetitive in nature. Besides, it heavily relies on straightforward rules-driven operations and calculations. But, as much as the process looks easy and cheap, it is difficult to achieve 100% accuracy – with or without automation.

Where does the challenge come in? The unplanned, yet common-place interruptions may result to unintended disruptions to the pay cycle. That includes cases of off-cycle changes as a result of different business events, non-standard process requests or unforeseen changes in statutory regulations.What makes RPA-based HR payroll software exceptional technology is how it responds to suchunpredictable interventions. Thanks to emergency of AI, developers have equipped RPA technologies with self-learning capabilities. That way, it ensures that the system can comfortably respond to various changes – and most importantly, execute tasks that go beyond basic processing.

  • Easy to implement – It’s true that systems that utilize RPA across different industries are significantly advanced. But that doesn’t mean that they are too complicated to implement. In fact, RPA-powered global payroll software solutionsare relatively easy to deploy and use. You don’t need to have any coding capabilities or make any changes to your IT infrastructure.

Deploying RPAtechnologies in organizations whose data is spread across multiple, fragmented systems would be a huge step in increasing the efficiency of operations. Besides, the communication between robotic software – unlike with human interactions – becomes much easier and reliable.For example, if a certain field in your payroll system has missinginformation;the employee will complete the field by filling in the required information before processing payroll. But, thanks to RPA self-learning technology, the software would identify the missing field and rectify the error. That way, it eliminates the need of human involvement ad frees up time for other equally important tasks.

RPA and the future of payroll processing

Today, RPA is a hot topic in business media. There are those who fear that the robots will take over their jobs. There are those that think the technology will make the work of HR and payroll processing professionals easier.

But here is the big question: Will RPA payroll systems augment the efficiency of payroll processing or it is will lead to emergence of just another disruptive “job -stealing robots”?

According to a study conducted by the BBC, 97% of payroll positions are likely to be automated in the next 25 years.  Besides, a large number of other repetitive administrative roles are also likely to become automated, too.

But will the transformations render payroll professionals jobless?  Not entirely. RPA payroll software is focused on increasing day-to-day payroll processing efficiency. The increased effectiveness will free up your workforce to tackle other equally important tasks – and that includes the insightful data that results from the automation.  As a result of the automation, the overall employee requirement for payroll processing in businesses is likely to reduce.

Besides, the new HR payroll software it will create new opportunities. For example there will be a sharp increase in the number of payroll data experts ad payroll analysts specialized in analyzing the accuracy and efficiency of RPA.

Summing it up

Payroll processing is very sensitive. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that eat into your employees’ time and might make them make blunders that would dearly cost your business. Introducing robots in your HR systems reduces the time spend ‘consulting’ different software agents to retrieve the data required to prepare your payroll. That means human errors will be reduced, and thereby increasing the quality of work performed.

So it’s either you get it right or pay for it.

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