How Paycom and Beti® Cut Labor for Payroll Processing by 90%

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 of 2023.

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 can manage their own payroll with Paycom and Beti.

How could your company benefit from Paycom and Beti?

The composite organization 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 Rather than stumbling through an outdated process, the organization’s HR team: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 traditional payroll process, the interviewess’s HR team was forced to manually enter and verify hours, benefits, bonuses, deductions, reimbursements and more every payroll cycle. Even worse, HR had no way of addressing errors until after payroll ran. Meanwhile, employees were 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 improved 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:

How could Paycom transform your business? Use our Forrester Consulting calculator to find out.

And remember, this data captures only what can be quantified. It doesn’t consider a potential compliance crisis the composite company avoided. Nor does it capture the exact value of having more engaged and productive employees.

Luckily, Forrester Consulting interviewed real clients 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 the interviewees’ businesses 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 prevented employees from easily accessing their data. Because the pieces of the legacy HR solution weren’t truly united under a single platform, 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 these costs by putting payroll in employees’ hands.

2. Greater employee trust

Businesses can get only so far without their workforce’s support. When outdated processes prevent employees from accessing the data that affects them the most, it can gradually chip away at the trust in their employer. And a single error on an employee paycheck may serve as the final straw, creating animosity and significantly increasing the likelihood of churn.

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

While some HR professionals enjoy working with data, nobody entered the field to slog through 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 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 interviewed customers’ 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 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Paycom to learn how letting employees do their own payroll with Beti benefited the composite organization. And use this calculator to see how Paycom could benefit your business.