Future Payroll Provides Compliance Reporting

Of course payroll systems have to provide compliance reporting, right? Well, yes. But the degree that it is supported makes all the difference.

For example, we could provide a reporting system that lets users select all the data needed to fill out a tax form, and call it ‘compliance reporting.’ Or we could have a purpose-built report that selects all the same data, automatically creates a filing-ready PDF form at the right time, emails a notice to the approver that it’s ready to review. The approver clicks on the link, reviews the PDF and if correct then click the ‘approve’ button and the payroll system electronically files the result with and pays the balance to the agency.

Which process would you rather use? I think most people would select the latter. That is certainly technically possible for most compliance reporting, and it is the option hardly ever delivered by large-company payroll systems such as SAP. Most payroll systems would deliver a report that gives you the information needed, and then someone in payroll transcribes that to the actual form that has to be submitted to the agency. Future Payroll has to do better than that. The technology exists! But why hasn’t it been delivered in our favorite SAP Payroll and its close relative Employee Central Payroll?

And so much of what is delivered as compliance reporting often needs significant customization or configuration by clients before it is usable. But why? Everyone has the same compliance reporting requirements, so why do we make each customer incur the cost of customizing it?

My hunch is that most software companies are intimidated by the complexity and legal liability of compliance reporting, and customers haven’t made it an important criteria for the selection process. For example, in the US there are well over 4,000 tax authorities and many of them have very specific tax filing, payment and reporting requirements that change over time. It’s a daunting task to handle that. And software companies have too often seen themselves as, well, developers instead of solution-providers. So instead of investing in the functionality to automate those compliance processes, SAP and other software providers make their customers incur those costs. And customers accept that because they are used to doing it themselves anyway.

So Future Payroll has an opportunity to provide so much more value to customers by truly automating those compliance processes. Maybe it’s programmed directly into the software for some countries and in other countries there is a seamless integration with a third-party provider. Either way – Future Payroll will provide so much more value in compliance reporting.