Hopefully, by now you are done with your 2022 compensation year-end, and if you’re not you should be close.
I must ask, are you still using spreadsheets?
I assume the answer is yes if you are reading this article.
Look, we get it, Excel is the best option when you are starting out with a handful of payees or when you are just starting to expand from a very simple plan. You may also have opted for Excel because your plan is “unique” or “complex”. But you must realize at this point there is a better way. A way that will save time and money, eliminate mistakes, secure your data, improve your employee experience, and give you better access to the data you need to be agile in uncertain times.
Isn’t it time to think about automating your compensation administration? There are so many ways that an automated system can Elevate Your Compensation Administration, that we wrote an article about it. But for this post, I want to focus on a specific element that is a key influence on all those elements.
One System
The concept is easy. We see it all the time in our tech-driven lives. One automated system takes the place of a variety of manual processes, technologies, and cobbled-together systems. However, in the case of compensation administration, this streamlining can have substantial ramifications for the comp team and the entire company.
The Old Way
Your current Excel cycle likely takes major administrative effort. Depending on the size of your organization and the way your groups are broken down, your team could be creating dozens of spreadsheets. This is no minor task, updating employee rosters, checking updated formulas, adding historical data, and confirming hierarchy, roll-ups, and groupings.
Once this is completed, you must distribute this information to the relevant managers for their input. This part is “cringe-worthy” in today’s high-risk data security landscape. Off-line spreadsheets that can be sent to the wrong email address, get stolen, or get misplaced – all are a CSO’s nightmare. Factor in the issues with version control and data entry mistakes by managers and you are really exposing the company to risk and extra work.
Now, this is all “Round 1”. If you are lucky enough to have this all go smoothly, these reports have to be recollected, merged together, and checked for anomalies, mistakes, and outliers. Then the process starts over again.
I don’t have to tell you all of this, you are living it. The entire process when handled manually (read Excel) is infinitely more complicated, takes an unreasonable amount of time, and becomes a burden for not only the comp team but all the managers and personnel involved.
A Better Way
Fear not, there is a much better, easier, quicker, safer way to do it.
With an automated compensation system like our Compose Suite, you can streamline the entirety of this process. Free up an enormous amount of time for comp admins and managers alike. Eliminate the risks of exchanging unsecured files back and forth offline. Remove errors, redundancies, calculation delays, and versioning issues, and work in real time.
The best part is you sacrifice nothing in the switchover. While I am sure there are idiosyncrasies in your planning and program, I assure you that they can be replicated AND automated in the right system. A system like ours is built on the concept of a tailored solution. In other words, it takes our decades of experience and combines it with the specific traits of your rewards program, giving you a solution that does everything you do now, with none of the hassles.
But that’s not the end of it. An automation compensation tool will not just replace your manual process, it will exceed it.
- Auto-generated total rewards statements
- Real-time data, updates, and anomaly tracking
- The ability to easily run what-if scenarios
- Tracking against budget targets down to the manager level
- Strict permissioned cloud-based access
- Robust compensation data and analytics in real-time
- Out of the box, compliant DEI & People Data graphics, and reports
- Compliant, audit trails to track every authorized change
We could go on, but maybe a picture would help…….
