Why Analyzing Payroll Data is Critical to Success

Payroll is one of the most commonly underused resources available to businesses when it comes to insight. It has the power to shine a light on your largest resource and overhead—your people. Tapping into payroll data analytics can help you better understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie. A good payroll system should provide data showing where your money is going and how you can benefit from your most valuable assets, your employees and customers.

In the past, the unfortunate perception of payroll was of a repetitive administration machine. But that’s changing. Innovative updates to payroll technology have given payroll a seat at the reporting table, and businesses can better analyze their greatest asset and largest cost.

Payroll now has room to play a more strategic and valuable role. Employee compensation is not simply a cost to contain but an important consideration that will save money and drive efficiency in the long term.

However, payroll professionals must use and understand the large amounts of data available to them if their businesses are to keep up with the competition. Research by Sage and IDG has found that companies with more effective data grow 35% faster.

Reporting is crucial

As highlighted by our research, reporting is key to business success. It can contribute not only to growth but also to the productivity of employees. Businesses with more usable data increase productivity by 10%.

For payroll professionals, it allows you to understand and make the best use of your company’s biggest capital investment—the employees. After all, the wages a business commits to the workforce directly impact the money it makes.

Reporting and analytics are of immense value. And they can help in the two biggest financial priorities—cost reduction and forecasting—allowing your company to grow and succeed in a business world where every advantage counts. Combining payroll data with qualitative elements such as performance culture, skills, behavior, and experience can help you form a picture of the issues affecting business performance.

Information used in this article was provided by our partners at Sage.