Webinar
Charting a path forward: Find your advantage with outsourced HR and payroll
Nov 06, 2024 · Authored by Kim Wylam, Alexandra Missildine, Gillian Florentine
For businesses of any size, human resources (HR) play a critical role in developing teams, establishing company culture and shaping the business’s future. As the organization grows and changes, those needs grow and change too. In the beginning, your focus is on building teams, mitigating employee-related risk and developing processes. As the business matures, you need data to help reduce costs, retain talent and maintain your culture.
The question is: Does your business have the resources it needs to strategically chart a path forward?
In this on-demand webinar, our Baker Tilly Advantage outsourced human resources and accounting professionals discuss:
- The advantage of outsourcing both HR and payroll
- How HR and payroll technology supports strategic growth
- HR and payroll compliance and mitigating employee-related risks to your business
Key takeaways from our discussion
Outsourcing can provide the expertise you need in the moment
Whether your organization is just starting out or your business is established and experiencing growth, outsourcing functions like accounting, HR or payroll can provide the expertise you may need at that moment. Outsourcing can provide seamless reporting across functions and scalable back-office support to keep key stakeholders focused on the business instead of those back-office tasks. Additionally, outsourcing can provide a backup person at the ready to keep your business running smoothly if your in-house staff suddenly becomes unavailable or if the workload becomes too overwhelming or time consuming.
The business landscape is changing
With the exponential rise of work from home from a few years ago continuing in some capacity today, small to mid-sized companies may feel like they’re competing directly with bigger organizations. In terms of recruiting, hiring and benefits, the pool of applicants and competition has gotten so much wider and deeper in recent years that organizations really need that expertise to develop a long-term HR strategy. And if that expertise can’t be found in-house, outsourcing is a potential solution.
The other half of the equation is compliance. Compliance is something that doesn’t go away, especially in accounting and human resources, but outsourcing can help streamline these functions since they tend to work together. When you add remote and hybrid work on top of that, the situation can get even more complicated with different regulations per state on the HR and payroll side coupled with multistate registrations and filings on the accounting side.
Technology can help
If your processes are currently very manual or you’re realizing you have outgrown your current systems, having the right accounting or HR software can help automate and streamline processes. Software, however, is reliant on inputs and you also need someone behind the software who not only can check that the software is getting the right information but who is able to accurately interpret the data. An outsourcing team can not only provide the data you need when you need it but are able to ask the right questions and provide the answers and strategy you need to keep your business moving forward.
Use outsourcing to help mitigate risk
There’s always a risk if your business isn’t compliant with regulations on either the accounting or HR and payroll side. Your business could incur fines for noncompliance, but your company also runs the risk of reputational harm for not following the rules. No size organization – from one employee to 1000+ employees – are exempt from regulatory compliance and not having the procedures in place to ensure that compliance is a big risk that you shouldn’t be willing to take. Outsourcing to someone with that needed expertise can help flag areas that need to be addressed to stay compliant and mitigate risk across the board.
There is no "right" time to outsource
While outsourcing from the get-go might be the ideal situation to set your business up for success, when you’re already an established entity, the timing can look a little different. If you’re a start-up, being able to focus on strategic growth might be easiest if you outsource all your HR, payroll and accounting functions. More mature organizations tend to look to tailor solutions to what they need at that moment to remove some of the less strategic tasks from their controller or human resource person’s plate.
Assessments can give you a starting point
If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend taking an assessment to see where your organization is currently and where there is room for improvement. Baker Tilly Advantage offers two complimentary assessment tools: the HR Checkup and the Business Confidence Survey. Each of these assessments give you a high-level look at your business’s functions and returns a report to you with your scores and risk level in key areas as well as best practices to help you move forward.
