SaaS Payroll benefits

A Compelling Business Case For Moving Payroll To The Cloud

by Paul Rudo on 25/08/10 at 8:35 am

Paycheck When most of us think about business continuity and disaster planning, we usually think of limiting the business impact of things such as lost sales, halted productivity, and damaged customer relationships. But not much thought is given to the effects that unplanned downtime or data loss might have on your most important investment of all… your employees.

But here’s something else to consider. Try to think back to some of the recent major disasters that we’ve seen.

The earthquakes in Haiti.
The9-11 terror attacks the shutdown New York City.
Hurricane Katrina.
The East Coast brownout.
The dozens of floods and hurricanes that happen every year, all over North America.

All it takes is one unexpected event to completely shut down your business. In a major emergency, all electricity and lines of communications can be cut.

This is perfectly fine if you run a geographically local business. People will generally understand in times of crisis such as this. But what if you have a larger company – with many employees – and operations spanning many different countries.

How understanding do you think your national and international employees will be if you suddenly cut off their pay checks because you can’t power your servers?

“It’s not my problem. I have mortgage payments. Give me my money.”

Unexpectedly late pay checks can have a major disruptive effect on your employees’ lives. It can lead to bad credit, inability to pay the rent, breach of child support payments, and a lot of other personal problems that could creep into their professional life.

Most of all, late payment can create a lack of trust and resentment towards the employer. Your best employees will quit, and the lousy employees will steal from you or even sue you out of fear that you can’t keep up your end of the bargain. This could be a catastrophic situation for your HR.

One of the good things about doing business with cloud service providers is that their entire business model depends on their service being completely resilient and always online & available. They invest very heavily in things such as redundant fail over facilities, continuous backups, virus protection, emergency power and redundant network connections, etc…

If your head office (or whichever office handles your payroll) should suddenly be wiped out, a SaaS payroll system allows you to temporarily hand this responsibility over to another office which hasn’t been affected by the disaster.

Because these services are hosted on the Internet, they can be accessed and administered from any location in the world without moving any equipment around. Should the unexpected happened, this will really help minimize the costs, risks & liabilities incurred by your company from this disaster.

Moving payroll to the cloud is a cost-effective and secure way to avoid the expensive embarassment of late salary payment in the event of unplanned server downtime.