Government contractor undergoes software assessment to update payroll system

Client background

The company is a government contractor based in Washington, D.C with offices around the globe.

The business challenge

As a global company operating post-pandemic, employees were moving and traveling across state and country lines, while several states began updating laws regarding employee payroll practices. The company’s current payroll technology system no longer supported the global or nation-wide nature of the business. The system could not properly support taxation for such a mobile employee population or integrations from their various human resources (HR) and financial systems. This resulted in long manual processes surrounding processing payroll taxes, leave of absences, and benefit deductions as well as aggregating and validating information across technology platforms.

In order to maintain their compliance and continue desired growth, the company was working on an expedited timeline to mitigate risk and needed support with assessing current payroll processes before exploring alternative technology options.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly's digital solutions team, in collaboration with Baker Tilly Vantagen, worked with the company to aggregate information on current payroll processes and technology options to understand the current needs of the organization. Opportunities for improvement were highlighted and examined to see if improvements were feasible for the current system and processes. When the determination was made that the best pathway forward was a new payroll solution, a prioritized list of critical functional and technical requirements was developed.

This technology evaluation process further identified what was and was not feasible in their current system and what changes would be needed in the new system to improve critical payroll processes moving forward. Once basic requirements and a timeline for development was understood, Baker Tilly went to work on selecting a vendor short-list that filtered out vendors who could not meet critical requirements or the proposed timeline.

While working through the technology evaluation process, we leveraged our project management expertise to keep the evaluation on-track in terms of both scope and timeframe. We ensured all parts of the process were tracked and documented so the company could use selection artifacts, notes and resources to refer to during the implementation process. Our experience in organizational change management was also used to document potential changes a new payroll system could present and its impact on employees. This gave the company opportunity to share and socialize employee impacts across the broader business to help minimize disruption from the new system and prepare employees for the change.

By walking the company through a technology selection process, they were able to select a system that would help:

• Reduce manual processes in the long-term for the payroll team and the business as a whole
• Provide better payroll reporting capabilities (especially around wages, benefit deductions, leave, and taxes)
• Allow the company to maintain their compliance and be proactive in future problem solving

The company is currently in the process of implementing the selected technology.