In the second part of our article examining push and pull techniques used to communicate pay, we explore the pros and cons of pull epayslip services.
Last month, we looked at the advantages and disadvantages of using push epayslip services to communicate pay with employees. In this article we conclude with a more detailed look at pull epayslip services.
A quick recap what push or pull means
- Services that push information to employees, take pay data from the sender to the employee. An example of this is a PDF of a payslip attached to an email.
- Services that use pull communications, provide access to pay data at a centralised point for an employee to retrieve. An example of this is a service like our Epay solution where employees login to a secure online portal to view their payslips.
The benefits of pull services
It’s fair to say, there are less pull epayslip service providers in the UK currently than push providers. Often suppliers offering a pull service have Epay as a core area of their business and have invested in technical and security expertise to develop their own secure and future ready solutions: because reselling push services did not meet their customers’ needs.
Given the diversity of these pull systems, we can only base the advantages and disadvantages below on our pull Epay solution, however as a leader in this market we hope to give you a good understanding.
Security: Pull epayslip systems rely on less data transfer and are therefore more secure than pushing data to countless users and devices. If your service provider is ISO 27001 approved, you can also be confident your sensitive data will remain safe and secure.
Accessibility: Using a pull epayslip system employees can access their data anytime, anywhere from any internet enabled computer, tablet or smartphone.This potentially opens up epayslips to every employee, not just those who are office based or use fixed devices.
Flexibility: A pull epayslip service can use payroll data from multiple systems, allowing organisations the flexibility to consolidate pay data for employees with more than one job roll. The payroll department can also migrate to a different payroll system in the future without disrupting employee access.
Resource efficient: A centralised pull epayslip service presents current and historical payslips in one place, so employees can find what they need without contacting the payroll department.
Future ready: In part one of this article we explained the resource intensive nature of push smartphone epay applications. In contrast, our pull epayslip service has been designed to offer employees a mobile optimised view of their payslips whatever device they use. By taking this approach, we can more effectively adapt as technology changes without the need to pass on significant development costs to our customers.
The disadvantages to pull services
The only real disadvantage we have experienced is when employees have no access to the internet at work, home or on-the-go. But as only 20% of adults in the UK now fall in to this category (and this figure is continuing to go down) it is less of an issue day by day. For now, our response is to provide a print service for those who need it.
Conclusion
Push or pull, whichever route you choose to take, we hope this article has given you ideas to ask the challenging questions on Epay that will deliver the best results for your organisation.
