Payroll Intelligence solves the multi-billion dollar problem.

If you were one of the country’s biggest employers, for a while you were likely to be ‘shoulder tapped’ by various Government and Audit teams to review your Holiday Pay. Since then, most other big employers simply volunteered for the same exercise so they could address the issue out of the media spotlight. Those employers would engage a large consultancy firm (four names in particular probably spring to mind) and they find what they find.

 

Sure, not every organisation is going to be on the government’s radar for this, but many other employers have gone down this path for their own reasons. Payroll Intelligence has been the “Happily fifth” option behind those Big Four; we work with the other 99% of Kiwi employers who might need specialist review but don’t fancy a seven-figure invoice at the end. Those clients of ours all asked the same question: Can Payroll Intelligence actually do the payroll from now on, so these problems never happen again? Well, it’s not really what we’re set up to do, but let’s have a think…

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Assessing the landscape.

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There’s probably about 50 payroll vendors available in this country already (no, we haven’t actually counted). It’s a bit of a head-scratcher that only about one of them seems to have really grasped the Holiday Pay issue - a set of laws that has been on their desks for twenty years - but that is another conversation. The big question is: do people really want a ‘51st’ option?

 

Our core role is already challenging enough; retrospectively interpreting how the complex 2003 Holidays Act should have been applied across our clients’ various industries: everything from Teachers to Nurses, Shift workers to Salespeople, Casuals to CEOs, Annual Holidays, Employees coming and going from ACC and Parental Leave, pay rates and rosters chopping and changing. How are you supposed to execute that same level of perfection, on the fly?! Or more specifically, how are you supposed to build a software that users can easily ‘pilot’ but has all the capability to nail all those scenarios?

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Tricky, isn’t it?​

Arriving at the solution.

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There’s a lot to process with this next bit so we’re going to keep it light...

• So far our ideas are just more of the same. We need to solve the actual problem: the current combination of people + software. It’s an imperfect union.

• Technology is obviously faster and costs less, provided it is built properly. Humans can be trained to interpret the law but any human being is slower, expensive, we forget stuff and make mistakes. Even when we’re on top of our game, we need a mouse, a keyboard and a screen simply to tell a computer what we’re getting at.

• And for all that human intervention, how many companies still have basic mistakes in their payroll DNA without them even realising? We see those mistakes all the time: Annual Leave being taken as hours or days, creative ways of getting their liabilities totally wrong. Employers are investing in human operators but it's no guarantee of accuracy.

• We could replace the payroll tool with one we can review and flag users if they're about to make a mistake. We just need to run the payments past our checks on the way through. If our arrears software saw enough cases it would eventually check automatically, it’s just Machine Learning [yes, we were onto this a year before you had even heard of ChatGPT]. The human input becomes less and less.

• That’s a huge leap, and the current payroll companies are already telling businesses it’s cheap and they’re supposedly getting it right. Let’s not open up that whole debate again, the issue is: what’s our point of difference?

• We’re not burdening them with tasks that are beyond their skillset: no more paying someone to needlessly sit at a screen google-ing rules or battling their payroll tool. They take care of the time, we take care of the money. Their valuable energy can be redeployed on some other task that's actually benefiting their business.

• As for who’s getting it right, we have to rely on the intelligence of the client. If we douse any 'historical fires' at the beginning - using the software we already have - the ongoing payroll is a level of airtight that nobody else can match. The most important thing to employers is paying their team correctly, what other payroll vendor is committed to that level of groundwork in order to get it right?

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Introducing Tempus.

 

There are famous words to the effect of 'You can’t keep optimising a candle. At some stage you have to upgrade to the light bulb'. We have that light bulb. We call it Tempus. Tempus is built by the same Kiwi company that has spent several years remediating payroll issues. We know where the legal cracks and traps are, we’ve built a masterpiece that succeeds where others have failed.

 

It’s not the 51st entry into a market of old payroll technology, it’s the 1st of the next generation. It would have stopped everyone’s historical problems dead in their tracks, but it’s not just a safety net, it’s a more cost-effective way to allocate your resources and get this task done. The fusion of our two suites means a perfect payroll timeline can be established and maintained for each employee, without blurring the exercise into a search for any possible historical underpayments.

 

Employers can evolve this part of their business, knowing that the entire proposition has been de-risked better than ever before.

 

Tempus. It’s a matter of time.