3 Key Strengths of Workday Payroll for France

Control, flexibility, and insight. These are three strengths of Workday Payroll applications that empower payroll professionals every day.

Today we are introducing Workday Payroll for France, which extends to France the same control, flexibility, and insight that we have delivered with our payroll offerings for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. Here’s a deeper look at why these strengths are important to customers.

Control

Maintaining control over payroll is important, but for many organizations there are two main barriers to having control: A lack of self-service options and using separate HR and payroll systems that aren’t properly integrated.

Payroll professionals are responsible for collecting, checking, and submitting their payroll data; ensuring compliance with regulatory and business requirements; and developing reports and strategies around labor costs. When self-service isn’t an option, control is lost when your third party provider executing payroll runs is not reporting information back in a common data model, which makes it impossible to have a comprehensive view of your global workforce costs.

It’s simple to maintain control when payroll is unified with HCM in a single system, which ensures all significant changes (employee status, tax changes, etc.) flow from HCM to payroll. This results in less data entry, minimal fact checking, and fewer errors. When data consistency is guaranteed, it’s easier to generate standardized or custom reports. The combination of a unified system with a powerful calculation engine built to handle the most complex payroll requirements lets organizations control every step of the payroll process.

 Flexibility

It’s critical to have the ability to configure your payroll process and calculation engine any way you want. When business processes change or a company reorganizes, payroll professionals need to be able to change payroll with minimal effort, and without unduly stressing the IT department. A pure cloud solution is far superior to a heavily customized ERP configuration as it lowers cost of ownership and reduces complexity by making it easy to make changes when required. And automatic, frequent updates in the cloud means that staying up-to-date with regulatory and legislative changes happens without any effort on the part of the customer.

In France, the Déclaration Sociale Nominative (DSN), the country’s new unified social welfare data reporting requirement, is an example of where the flexibility of Workday Payroll for France can hugely benefit payroll practitioners. Although the new rule consolidates at least 30 separate reports on each employee into one, for many companies the migration and consulting costs, coupled with difficult integrations, are creating a lot of stress. However, when payroll and HCM are unified in one system, and tax changes are automatically updated, DSN compliance becomes much more manageable.

Insight

Transparent is probably the last word most people would use when talking about their current payroll systems. Reports—especially in a form that business leaders can understand—are painful to generate. This is unfortunate, because to take action you need to be able to quickly get answers. If information isn’t real-time, you’re making decisions using stale data.

Because payroll never stops and time is always tight, the ability to ask a question, quickly get an answer, and take action based on that response—all within your payroll system—leads to truly actionable insight.

Workday enables payroll professionals to generate any custom report, drill down into individual employees’ records, and compare payroll results across periods. Not only does this let you review real-time payroll data and analytics before payroll is run, it also gives visibility into global labor costs by worker classification, region, or year-to-date.

Because of payroll’s vital importance, we are constantly trying to make the lives of busy payroll professionals easier, more productive, and more valuable to the overall business. Workday Payroll for France is the latest chapter in our quest to evolve payroll so that control, flexibility, and insight are built into everything you do.