Forms Automation for Payroll

Your ERP manages a lot of the heavy lifting in Payroll but the processes surrounding payroll still rely heavily on manual data entry and transcription from physical forms. Introducing technology like Forms management and Robotic Process Automation can significantly reduce errors and processing times by forcing data to be validated before it’s submitted by end users and integrated data directly into your ERP.

John Marney:

Thanks for joining us everyone. Welcome back, if you joined us for our 11 o’clock presentation on IBM and CloudSuite, my name is John Marney. Thank you, Keith, for the wonderful introduction. Today we’re going to be talking about forms automation solutions for payroll. The automation solutions that we’re talking about leverage a number of different software technologies. However, most of the concepts that we’re talking about apply broadly to various workflow, form platforms, etc. This is one part of a larger webinar week that we’re hosting here in Kansas City, that is running all week. Please visit our website if you are interested in any of the enforced focus or any of the other enforced focus content. January webinars, we will return to a regular form once a month for the CPA practice and the content for January TBB. We’re looking at doing some fresh on base presentations. We do have some upcoming office hours where we do a little bit more of a technical deep dive into some specific topics and products.

In December, we’re going to be talking about image snap tasks. And in January, we’re doing our rescheduled November office hours for our Perceptive experience. If you don’t know me, again, my name is John Marney. I’m the manager of Solution Delivery here at the content and process automation practice at RPI, we focus on various content and workflow platforms such as Perceptive, OnBase, Kofax TotalAgility, what have you, as well as our own suite of Yoga products for various automation. I’ve been doing this for nine plus years, scary, close to 10. It’s been, it’s flown by. I am a connoisseur of fine product documentation. I know a good one when I see it and I am a proud father of a, almost nine-month-old. Also, the height and weight of a two-year-old.

Mason Auch:

Alrighty, well my name is Mason Auch. I’m a Business Analyst here with RPI Consultants. I have two years of automation experience. I definitely have some wanderlust. I love going out, or a wunderkind, going out and kind of experiencing different things and just the memories that that creates. I’ve raced a Formula One style open road race car on Michigan’s International Speedway and I’m a whiskey connoisseur.

John Marney:

Wow, speed demon. Okay, so agenda today we’re going to walk through some of the payroll workflows and processes that can leverage automation. Then we’re going to kind of switch gears and talk about some of the technology products that can be used to introduce automation into your workflows. And then we’ll kind of combine the two and talk about how those technologies are applied to solve the automation challenges within those workflows. We do have about an eight to ten-minute demonstration from our Senior Solution Architect, Alex Lindsey.

Finally, we’ll take questions. Again, if you don’t know how to take questions, please expand the go to webinar panel. There’s a questions [inaudible 00:03:49] type it in and we’ll get to it, whether it’s during the webinar or at the end. Okay, so let’s talk about payroll workflows of processes that we want to automate for you. First one is a payroll check request. So similar to any other types of check requests within your organization. These are for a manually cutting a check outside of your typical payroll processes. Most often, in most organizations, this is going to be a paper form. If you’re lucky, it’s an electronic PDF form that’s distributed out to people available to download and probably still print it out and manually fill it in. And then after it’s submitted, it is generally hand keyed, manually updated in your ERP. The GL data elements, which are generally critical to make sure that the accounting is appropriate for this check request, may be known by the person filling it out.

They may not be known by the person filling it out there and not being really known by anybody. And even if they do fill it out, it may not be valid. So, this, by converting this to electronic form, we can introduce a lot of validations there.

Mason Auch:

Yeah, one of the o