No matter the industry, every business benefits from accurate, efficient and engaging payroll.
But what is the potential value of Paycom and Beti®? Nearly $3.8 million over three years — and 90% less payroll-processing labor — for a composite organization, according to a commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Paycom in June.
Total Economic Impact™ methodology
To create the composite organization, Forrester Consulting interviewed professionals at five organizations that use Paycom and Beti, the HR software’s employee-guided payroll experience.
Beti automatically flags payroll errors, then leads employees to resolve those issues before submission.
Forrester Consulting then aggregated the interviews and combined the results to form a single composite organization with:
- 2,500 employees
- 70 U.S.-based locations
- multiple pay structures
What made up that three-year benefit, and how did Beti transform the organization’s payroll process so quickly? To find out, let’s explore what Forrester Consulting discovered happens when employees do their own payroll with Paycom and Beti.
How did the composite company benefit from Paycom and Beti?
The composite company used Beti to improve the way it processed payroll. Rather than stumbling through an outdated process, the organization’s HR team:
- reduced the labor needed to process payroll by 90%
- cut the time spent correcting payroll errors by 85%
- saved 2,600 hours annually
Under a traditional payroll process, HR is forced to manually enter and verify hours, benefits, bonuses, deductions, reimbursements and more every payroll cycle. Even worse, HR has no way of addressing errors until after payroll runs. Meanwhile, employees are left to deal with the consequences of an incorrect paycheck.
By switching to Paycom and Beti, the composite company secured its three-year benefit worth $3,775,365. Quantified benefits included heightened efficiency for HR and accounting, plus substantial savings from consolidating legacy systems.
Here’s a complete summary of Paycom’s value to the composite organization adjusted for 2023:
| Total Quantified Benefits of Paycom Over 3 Years for a 2,500-Employee Composite Organization | |
| Benefit | Present Value |
| Savings from consolidating legacy systems | $2,296,359 |
| Efficiency gains for the payroll team | $721,869 |
| Efficiency gains for HR and accounting teams | $481,574 |
| Paycom services | $275,563 |
| Total | $3,775,365 |
This data captures only what can be quantified. It doesn’t consider the potential compliance crisis the composite company avoided. Nor does it capture the exact value of more engaged and productive employees.
Luckily, Forrester Consulting interviewed the real representatives of customers using Paycom.
What did businesses say about Paycom and Beti?
Forrester Consulting interviewed the five professionals using Paycom and Beti on several topics, including:
- employee trust, engagement and retention
- HR’s newfound ways to positively impact business
- improving culture and knowledge about payroll
How employees thrive and succeed in a workplace can vary business to business. But Forrester Consulting found all of them benefited from a greater understanding of payroll — and less time manually processing it.
Let’s examine four areas of impact.
1. Improved engagement and retention
Previously, the interviewees’ companies relied on bulky legacy systems that kept employees from easily accessing their data. Because the pieces of this HR “solution” weren’t united in a truly single software, employees had to use a separate login to review their:
- pay
- hours
- benefits
- performance reviews
- development progress
- and more
Paycom empowers employees to access and manage all their HR data in one app with one login and password. This translated to better employee retention for a payroll manager in the manufacturing industry.
“The longevity of my employees at the sites that have the full Paycom experience has increased from nine months to 16 months on average,” they said. “Those employees are staying 75% longer.”
To put that advantage into perspective, Gallup found it costs 150% to 200% of an employee’s annual salary to replace them. Beti helped the manufacturer reduce this substantial loss by putting payroll where it always belonged: in employees’ hands.
2. Greater employee trust
Businesses can get only so far without their workforce’s support. And when payroll errors and outdated processes keep employees away from the data affecting them most, that gradually chips away at the trust they have in their employers.
With Paycom and Beti, however, businesses told Forrester they recorded:
- fewer payroll issues overall
- greater employee engagement
- a sharp decline in retroactive payroll corrections
“With Paycom and Beti, we are using payroll to engage employees in their pay and benefits,” said a vice president in the consumer services industry. “I have never seen payroll used as an employee engagement tool, so to me, it is incredible.”
It’s simple: Engagement fuels trust. In an article for Harvard Business Review, neuroscientist Paul J. Zak wrote businesses with higher levels of trust enjoy greater:
- productivity
- engagement
- retention
What could your organization accomplish with a more engaged workforce instead of trust-breaking payroll errors?
3. More versatile HR
Some HR professionals enjoy working with data. But none of them entered the field to slog through outdated legacy systems and payroll errors that could’ve been prevented.
When the companies in the study reduced the labor for payroll processing by 90%, that didn’t mean their HR professionals were suddenly without work.
Instead of constantly managing a process that could — and should — be automated, the HR teams were able to recalibrate and focus on improving the employee experience.
“Beti allows payroll people to breathe,” said a payroll manager in the consumer services industry interviewed in the Forrester Consulting study. “We are able to focus on other things on the to-do list, whatever those things may be.”
Forrester Consulting identified exactly what HR teams at the interviewed companies were doing with the reclaimed time and agility, including:
- adopting an apprenticeship program
- building better tracking and reporting capabilities
- researching and implementing new benefits
The HR teams likely will continue to find even more ways to expand their department’s impact as they reinvest the time they recovered through Beti’s employee-guided payroll.
4. Stronger culture and organizational knowledge
Before Paycom, questions about payroll meant employee frustration and confusion for the studied organizations. Now when employees have questions, they easily can find the answers themselves.
“We actively use Ask Here,” said a vice president of total rewards and systems in the consumer services industry. “Right now in Employee Self-Service®, we have a 99.85% employee usage rate. It has been incredible, life-changing.”
Paycom and Beti create a culture around accuracy, transparency and understanding. Interviewees told Forrest Consulting Beti encouraged employees to follow best practices, especially around tasks affecting their pay.
“The issue of employees not clocking in and out has gone down tremendously,” said a payroll manager in the consumer services industry. “They are looking at their checks a lot more.”
By extension, employees are more aware of the benefits available to them, as well as the exact value of those benefits. While HR invests in more ways to improve their people’s work lives, Paycom and Beti help organizations retain employees.
Read the complete Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study to learn more about how employee-guided payroll benefited the composite organization. And explore Paycom and Beti to see how a single software makes work easier for HR and employees.
DISCLAIMER: The information provided herein does not constitute the provision of legal advice, tax advice, accounting services or professional consulting of any kind. The information provided herein should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional legal, tax, accounting or other professional advisers. Before making any decision or taking any action, you should consult a professional adviser who has been provided with all pertinent facts relevant to your particular situation and for your particular state(s) of operation.