Payroll Software Rethought

Payroll Software rethought

Why new payroll software is necessary despite oversupply

Records from Athens show that the first payroll was kept 7000 years before Christ. In information technology, the first payroll was run in 1950 and commercialized with the introduction of the PC in the 1980s and 1990s. The last major innovation was with the introduction of the Internet, which allowed companies to outsource payroll.

However, the move to the cloud model is proving to be a major challenge for incumbent payroll software vendors. Adapting the mostly monolithic payroll software to a transaction-oriented processing model requires a complete redesign of the software. While the initial focus was on regulatory compliance, cloud-enabled payroll software is business- and customer-centric. Legacy software must be transformed into an open architecture to integrate with an ERP/HR platform. This gap between the current state and the desired state is increasingly impacting the productivity of the payroll process.

The objectives of the payroll software redesign were as follows

• Payroll data is determined by business cases
• All payroll data is calculated from business case data
• Multi-tenant capability of business cases, wage calculations and data reporting
• Wage definition is interchangeable between countries, industries and companies
• Payroll software can be integrated as a component in HR/ERP systems

The result is the Payroll Engine web service with a programming interface (REST API) that can be used by HR/ERP systems. Customer data is captured on a case-by-case basis and projected into the payroll period as wage data in the payroll run. Wage definition is based on regulation layers implemented by different countries, industries and companies. The Payroll Engine Ecosystem provides a marketplace for publishing and sourcing regulations.

Through novel approaches, we have created other innovations that have the potential to permanently change the nature of payroll software. These include test-driven regulation development with automated verification of payroll results. A flexible set of regulations (business cases, wage types, reports...) allows full automation of complex payroll cases. The historization of mutation data allows retroactive mutations and forecast scenarios without restrictions. With the trade and exchange of country and industry regulations, the payroll software has arrived in the modern age.