Last week, I presented a webinar with Ascentis where I gave a basic introduction into what Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is, discussed various benefits and advantages that a SaaS-based payroll solution has, and lastly, shared some tips on recognizing the differences in SaaS payroll vendors.

I hope you’ll check out the full webinar, but in the meantime, Here’s three key benefits that a SaaS-based payroll solution can provide:

#1:

With a SaaS Payroll Solution, you have total control and flexibility over the payroll process.  You can review payroll BEFORE employees are paid.  And closely related, you can fix mistakes quickly and easily.

No matter how careful you are when entering payroll, mistakes can and will happen.  With traditional payroll services, mistakes are only caught after the payroll has been completed.  Employees or the tax authorities catch the mistake days, weeks, or even months down the road.  Making corrections after-the-fact is a painful and costly process.  So it’s crucial to be able to catch and correct payroll mistakes early on, before checks are created and before someone else discovers the mistake.

There are a couple key capabilities that make this possible:

• With a SaaS Payroll Solution, you have complete control over payroll, because you can see the results of a payroll run instantly, BEFORE payroll is committed.  Both calculations and reports are generated in real time.  And “real time” doesn’t mean waiting around for 15 minutes or longer to get a report or to make a change like some vendors require.  True real time means getting work done and seeing results literally within seconds.
• The other key capability is detailed audit and exception reports to identify potential mistakes.  If you’ve got hundreds of employees, how are you going to identify the one employee that was mistakenly not paid?  Or how are you going to find out that one employee got paid twice as much as what he was supposed to get paid?  Exception reporting that catches mistakes like these is crucial to ensuring a perfect payroll.

Let’s talk through a typical real life scenario. Say you calculate your company’s payroll, then you look at the exception report and see that John Doe is an active employee, but he didn’t get paid and you realize that you made a mistake.  with a Saas-based payroll solution like the one Ascentis provides, you can immediately make the appropriate correction, re-calculate payroll, review your new reports, and when everything looks good, commit your payroll.  Your potential mistake has been found and fixed quickly and easily, and embarrassment and headaches have been avoided!

#2:

SaaS based payroll provides better data reliability and disaster recovery capabilities.  The risk of downtime or data loss due to a disaster, power loss, or other disruption is minimized. The people at Ascentis actually pride themselves on this one.

SaaS based payroll can utilize duplicate server environments in geographically separate locations, and your data is replicated.  This means that if one location goes down, we can recover from that disaster and get you back up and running without loss of data.

Keep in mind that because your data is held “in the Internet cloud” rather than on your local computer, you don’t have to worry about things like losing data due to your hard drive crashing or a thief stealing your computer, and you don’t have the hassle of making backup copies of your data.

The data-center is the facility where all of the computer hardware, network equipment and power recovery systems are located.  Within each data-center there are things like dedicated air cooling systems to keep the rooms cooled below 75 degrees, separately wired electrical circuits, and uninterruptable power supply systems with emergency battery power, independent dedicated Internet circuits, security locks with passkeys, and a fire suppression system.  All of that stuff is there to make sure that the service runs smoothly and is available to you 24×7, with no unplanned down time.

#3:

With a SaaS payroll solution, you’ve eliminated the need to invest in infrastructure.  There’s never a need to buy expensive hardware.  You avoid the traditional maintenance and upgrade issues of on-premise hardware and licensed software.  There is no significant ongoing IT burden, so you save on IT expense.

Rather than a huge upfront capital expenditure, there is a monthly fee based on the # of employees.  It becomes just another monthly bill, kind of like how you pay your water bill.  The big benefit here is predictability.  You know what you’ll be paying, there are no surprises.  For those of you that deal with your finance team, I guarantee that your CFO or controller will love that aspect of SaaS.

Please check out the webinar to learn about more of the benefits that a SaaS based payroll solution provides, to learn about SaaS in general, or to learn about how not all SaaS based payroll solutions are created equal.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Ascentis can help, visit our website here.

-Mike Lin