Of all the services that accountants offer, payroll is rarely a favourite to perform. It is always there needing to be done, regularly subject to changes in legislation, and with scope to generate lots of client queries.
The good news is that it is also an ideal candidate for an accounting firm to outsource to a specialist provider.
Here, we take a look at some of the reasons why you should consider outsourced payroll if you want to offer it to clients, but don’t want to take on the workload yourself.
Profit from payroll, focus on higher-value work
Just because you don’t spend time on payroll yourself doesn’t mean you can’t make a worthwhile profit from it.
You can still offer your clients value by identifying and working with a specialist provider who’ll carry out the work to a high standard.
This means that rather than simply turn clients away, or reluctantly take on the work yourself, you can still give them a helpful solution – while dedicating your time to higher-value business advisory services.
Cut out time-consuming queries
A large book of payroll clients and their employees opens the door to numerous monthly queries.
Payroll is complex and fluid. An accounting process at one end, it is emotive at the other with payday bringing joy to most people.
But should something feel awry, the people being underpaid, or not paid at all, will be quick to question it. Having to field the queries and, if necessary, put right any miscalculations can kill productivity for you or your staff.
Outsourcing payroll allows you to side-step such queries and let a dedicated third party handle them efficiently. That’s great news from a resource-planning perspective.
Improve your service
A team whose sole focus is on delivering high-quality payroll services is likely to be better suited to the task than someone who does it as part of a broader portfolio.
They will unlock efficiencies and deliver a consistency which is hard to match in-house, unless you devote budget and energy to emulating a complete payroll department.
This is expensive and fraught with hassle – such as resourcing to cover holiday and sickness absence.
Reduce risk in an increasingly complex world
You do not need us to go into detail about just how much more complicated payroll has become in recent years.
From pensions auto-enrolment to GDPR and RTI, not to mention the shifting sands of national minimum wage and other elements of employment law, so much responsibility has been shifted out of HMRC and onto employers.
If you are not 100% on it all the time, this poses compliance-based risk which could lead to fines, extra workload and reputational damage with clients. And of course, simply staying abreast of it all is a burden in itself.
By outsourcing the workload, you also outsource much of the risk, meaning that you gain peace of mind on top of all the other benefits of outsourcing.
Find out more about outsourced payroll
Considering all of the above, it is easy to see how you can not only cut many costs but also cut hassle and risk by outsourcing payroll – and all while retaining it as a profit centre in your business.
If you’d like to sell payroll services but let Diamond Outsourcing deliver them so you can focus on higher-value business advisory services, get in touch today.