Should a robot be your next hire?

25 May 2022

Andrew Guy, managing director at FD Intelligence discusses the merits of using robotic process automation for payroll processes

A few years ago, robotic process automation (or RPA) was not a phrase that was familiar to many. These days however, both RPA and automation are terms that appear more regularly in the media, often relating to labour and time-saving practices for organisations. With the current recruitment issues so many sectors are facing, I’m sure you can understand why. So, what is RPA? Rather than being a physical robot like you would see on a car production line, RPA refers to software (or virtual robots) that exist on computers, to automate routine and repeatable business processes. These software robots can launch and operate existing applications with virtually seamless integration.

It’s important to realise that RPA works within your systems rather than replacing them. The robots mimic human workers, performing the same actions and using the same applications, but carrying out the work more quickly and efficiently – and with 100% accuracy.

These robots are smart and efficient, but they’re not a substitute for human judgement. What RPA does is the ‘heavy lifting’. So, the robots will process thousands of tasks quickly and efficiently but will also pass any anomalies over to human staff.

This ‘management by exception’ is a tremendously efficient way of handling large volumes of work. The robot does the tedious and repetitive tasks – those where human employees are most likely to make mistakes. But RPA also ensures that anything requiring judgement is handled by a human. That makes work much more rewarding for your employees, who avoid the drudgery and get to work on more complex and stimulating tasks.

Why RPA for payroll?

Generally speaking, the benefits of RPA are considerable. It improves productivity and reduces costs and risks. It also increases employee engagement and satisfaction while improving the customer experience. As a result of the very substantial cost savings that result from RPA, a positive return on investment is typically achieved in three to nine months.

In terms of suitability for payroll, RPA ticks all the boxes including:

time saving
cost reduction
perhaps most importantly, accuracy.

It saves processing time by automating consecutive tasks in the workflow, which would have previously been carried out by a human. It does this while also reducing risk, as checks and measures can be included to ensure 100% accuracy.

RPA can be used across various parts of the payroll process, for example, Bacs processing. Here, a bot can be deployed to open payroll software, and then an individual client account. It can then choose the pay frequency period, open a pay run, store or save a Bacs value, before printing reports, saving (and renaming) PBX files and uploading these as required. As with all automations, human checks can be factored in at any point, if required (although the bot can also be set to highlight any anomalies it encounters that deviate from the norm).

Imagine an employee who works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days per year

Essentially, RPA gives you virtual employees – employees who never get sick, never take breaks and never make mistakes. They run unobtrusively in the background and carry out their tasks with complete procedural compliance.

These virtual employees are also more secure than their human equivalents. A robot can use a complex, 100-character password just as easily as a three-character one. And it can do almost anything a human employee can do on a computer. Legacy software, Excel, expensive new code and ancient or modern websites – an RPA robot can interact with them all. This makes them far more versatile than some of the simpler forms of automation.

Moreover, an RPA solution is simple to set up. Each robot only needs to be ‘trained’ once, following rules laid out by the people who have previously performed that role. The development of the robot is very quick compared with most software projects and is typically complete within a couple of months, depending on the complexity of the tasks involved. Once the first robot is built, it becomes much easier to build others by re-using some of the same blocks of code. Each of these blocks covers a specific function – a system login, for example. So, the project team quickly builds up a library of code blocks that can be re-used in subsequent robots and updated across all the robots at once – e.g. when a system login changes.

It’s an exciting time for the RPA market, as more organisations realise the potential for time and cost savings, in addition to allowing employees to make better use of their time. As previously misconceived by many businesses, automation doesn’t necessarily mean employees being replaced by robots – it’s a really effective way of freeing up time for staff to focus on the more ‘human’ element of their role, resulting in a happier workforce and happier customers.