Henderson Blake: Addressing Employee Payroll Issues through FlexiPayroll

In this age of automation, many organizations are still failing to view their payroll systems as strategic platforms and use them to change the way they run payroll and use technology to speed up the manual steps involved in the payroll process. Even today, many companies spend an excessive amount of time on manual tasks and approval processes relating to payroll. The Workforce Management and Payroll solutions offered by Henderson Blake get to the heart of this problem. “Payroll and timekeeping systems are just fancy calculators, and they will give you the wrong answer if you enter the wrong digits. We believe that the only way to get people paid correctly is to design systems that expect incorrect data and to automate the complex process of sanity checking the source data,” says Michael Rastas, MD of Henderson Blake.

Henderson Blake’s software – FlexiPayroll–has successfully reduced man-hours spent by HR, WFM and Payroll teams almost by eighty percent in some cases. Clients using Henderson Blake’s workforce management, timekeeping, and payroll solution have been able to achieve 100 percent payroll accuracy and substantial reductions to the size of the payroll team. Achieving 100 percent payroll accuracy is not achieved with a better calculator; it requires a process with checks and balances that guarantee that when someone enters incorrect information, it is detected and corrected before it impacts payroll.

“In many companies, the HR and payroll teams just have time to ‘get things done’ and lack time to make sure things are done right with cross checking and auditing. Our automated process-audit technology allows Payroll, HR and WFM teams to efficiently complete common tasks without the common hidden errors that require later rework,” elaborates Rastas. Moreover, FlexiPayroll can be customized accordingly—the system wraps around the client’s ongoing business processes and tools, without substantial organizational changes.

Rastas referred one such inci­dent where Henderson Blake helped one of its clients – a mul­tinational company with teams in Aus­tralia and the Philippines – to reduce the size of their payroll team by 70 percent. By tailoring the soft­ware to automate their internal busi­ness rules in such a way that their pay­roll team did not have to spend large amounts of time converting data in Excel and checking payroll became a streamlined process.

Ten years ago, it was almost an impossible undertaking for a company to get their employees paid without several employees having to file payroll disputes due to payment issues, incorrect timekeeping or payment data. The payroll team never seemed to have time to check everything and chasing up approvals was time-consuming. Henderson Blake’s software support addresses all these criticalities and induces flexibility within the payroll activities. “There is no reason that companies need to have supervisors or payroll staff spending hours of their week manually updating or approving data. Automation and process audit technology can take care of that,” adds Rastas. However, with an aim to excel in their service offerings, Henderson Blake is keen to improve its control over timekeeping, distribution management, analytics reporting, and HR oversight in the days to come.