Client communication problems and how to solve them

This content is brought to you by BrightPay.

To paraphrase a common saying, ‘it takes a village to run a payroll’. However, getting everyone in the village to communicate effectively can be a recurring issue for many accountants and payroll bureaus.

Producing an accurate, timely payroll every month requires a large amount of information to be generated, shared and approved to ensure success. This often means hours of chasing, email chains and phone calls to make sure all parties have the data they need, creating unnecessary stress for you and your clients.

Here, we’ll explore some of the most common communications issues that payroll providers and businesses face and how working with the right payroll software can help you streamline your processes to save time and energy.

Missing payroll information

To create an accurate payroll each month, clients need to provide the right information about their employees, including hours, holiday allowances, tax codes, overtime and more. Sharing data via spreadsheets, emails and phone calls is slow, inefficient and open to human error. Not to mention that reminding your clients to send you the data you need creates additional friction in the process.

Cloud payroll solutions enable you to centralise all your customer data in a single place, with real-time visibility for you and your clients. Not only does this help you catch errors, but it also means that clients can take on their share of the workload. 

BrightPay Connect, BrightPay’s cloud extension, connects you with your clients through a dedicated employer dashboard. Through this, they can ensure you always have the information you need by:

• Adding new starters as they join
• Entering and reviewing their employees’ hours 
• Adding additions and deductions that have been set up by the bureau in the payroll software
• Reviewing and authorising payroll details for the pay period

Losing time on routine enquiries 

Throughout the month, it’s common for internal HR teams or employees to have small information or update requests for their payroll provider. While these can be simple on the surface, over the course of the month they can add up to a significant drain on your time and resources.

With BrightPay Connect, it’s easy to centralise the information your clients and their employees need in a single location so they can find what they need themselves, without needing to chase you or your team.

• Clients can easily prepare preset reports within their own dashboards to check historical information and key metrics.
• Employees can access their payslips as well as check their ​​annual leave balance from the BrightPay employee self-service app. They can also view a calendar where they can see all of their past and scheduled leave.

Slow approvals

Once all the relevant details have been gathered and approved, it can be useful to have your clients’ approval, even if their payroll details don’t usually change from payroll to payroll. Bringing in your client to finalise the process both acts as a reminder for them to add any information which they may have otherwise forgotten about and also puts the onus on them to ensure that payroll information is correct, before you finalise the process.

With the Brightpay Connect online portals, you can securely send your clients a full, detailed payroll summary before the payroll is finalised. Clients can then review and authorise the payroll details for the pay period through their online employer dashboard, with a full audit trail and control.

Routine reminders

Keeping your clients on top of their compliance obligations is a key responsibility for any payroll expert, but reminding your clients about revenue payments, policy updates and process changes can be time-consuming and add unnecessary stress to relationships.

BrightPay Connect helps you keep your clients’ obligations top of mind by automatically tracking upcoming HMRC payment dates and the amount owed. The payment date and payment amount are clearly displayed on the online employer dashboard, with the option of automated reminder emails as the payment date approaches, saving you the hassle of reminding them.

Managing data queries

Payroll data compliance requires managing data points between a range of platforms and stakeholders, from accounting systems to HMRC. Discrepancies in this information can directly affect employees’ paychecks, as well as the company’s tax and pension obligations. 

Managing this process manually is a prime opportunity for human error and can lead to hours of back-and-forth harmonising data points between platforms, wasting time for you and your clients.

By using a digital solution for accounting and payroll, you can connect your client’s software systems via direct API connections, automating data transfer and reducing the possibility of missed or miscommunicated information.

BrightPay Payroll Software connects directly to HMRC,  leading pension providers, including NEST, The People’s Pension, Smart Pension and Aviva, 12 of the top accounting packages and a direct payment platform, reducing paycheck errors at every stage of the process and saving your clients checking every data point manually.

Communicate with confidence 

Collaborating with clients effectively is the heart of an efficient payroll process, but manual processes create unnecessary friction, roadblocks and risk when it comes to communication. By using digital tools, payroll bureaus and accountants can bring client communication into real-time, automating time-consuming processes and raising the level of data quality for all stakeholders.

To find out how BrightPay can help you and your clients streamline your communications, why not book a free online demo of our software. We also offer 60-day free trials if you would like to try it for yourself. 

This content is brought to you by BrightPay.

BrightPay is a payroll software that makes managing payroll quick and easy. .