Payroll is important to various groups for different reasons.
For employees, payroll is what enables them to pay their bills, buy groceries, put gas in their cars, raise their families, and so many other things.
For employers, payroll is also critical. The cost of payroll can determine the rate at which an organization expands, while different rules about payroll can determine where that expansion takes place.
Given how important payroll is, then—not to mention the fact that Workday gives organizations a single place to store all their information—companies should know how they can leverage their internal payroll data to operate more strategically and efficiently.
Analyzing your payroll data helps you plan for the future
To succeed, organizations must have a strategy for how they will grow. And while growth looks different for every organization, it typically involves hiring more employees, and possibly opening new offices.
To grow strategically, business leaders should know how much they’re currently spending on payroll, and how much they can afford to increase that number. Similarly, leaders need to know what effect regional payroll and payroll tax laws could have on their plans to open new offices in other states, or even countries.
Analyzing your payroll data helps you improve your payroll policies
Competitive organizations know the value of incentivizing their employees. But what if the incentives in question dramatically increase the amount spent on payroll?
Otherwise healthy organizations can sink or swim depending on the percentage of revenue that goes toward payroll. That’s why companies must be smart about their policies, particularly if there are legal obligations to consider, like rules regarding overtime.
The data housed within Workday can help payroll managers and stakeholders as they look for ways to develop policies that benefit employees and organizations alike.
Analyzing your payroll data can improve your data’s accuracy
Making strategic decisions about payroll is contingent, of course, on having accurate payroll data in the first place. And one of the great benefits of having a payroll service partner is that in-house payroll teams have more time for assessing the accuracy of that data. After all, not every payroll task is strategic. While a payroll partner handles the more tedious aspects of payroll processing, your team can spend more time making sure the foundations of payroll—i.e., the data used for every other payroll-based activity or decision—are rock solid in the first place.
Leverage dashboards to do more with your data
As a storehouse for all your data, Workday is an incredibly powerful tool that can empower organizations to make truly strategic decisions. And dashboards are the secret sauce in all this. If you can imagine it, someone can build a dashboard to help you report on it.
If you want to do more with your payroll data, leveraging Workday’s comprehensive reporting capabilities, internally or with the help of an application management partner, will help you accomplish that goal.
The data you need is already at your fingertips. You just have to use it.
