Today, we’ve invited one of our good friend from ADP, Heather Sperduto, to talk about some of the helpful solutions they offer for clients, specifically ADP payroll services, and to give you some ideas on ways you can streamline your payroll and Human Resources (HR) processes. No matter how much we’d like to have one, there is no “easy” button for life or running a business. However, there are services and processes available for business owners that can take some of the pressure off! Our goal in distributing content for business owners is to offer solutions that give you the ability to focus on continued growth and strategy. After today, you should be better equipped to tackle all sorts of tricky terrain in your business.
What we cover in this episode:
- 01:08 – Introduction to Heather Sperduto
- 03:52 – Most common payroll issues for small businesses
- 10:15 – How can ADP payroll services benefit businesses?
- 16:25 – Best practices to attract and retain top talent
- 18:20 – What’s on the horizon in payroll and HR?
- 21:49 – Where to get help and other resources
Introduction to Heather Sperduto
Heather Sperduto, the VP of Sales Operations at ADP, runs point on the design and execution of ADP’s program within the sales operations team that captures the accountant community. She describes the accountant community as those “who are really the heart and soul of advising business owners.” Heather also enjoys leading speaking engagements and interactive workshops to foster attendees’ personal and professional development.
Heather’s entire professional career has been with ADP as she started with the company immediately after she graduated college. Being able to grow with ADP over this span of time allows Heather to have a breadth of knowledge about the company and extensive, intimate business knowledge with business owners and accountants. When talking about her time with ADP, it’s clear she has a passion for her work. She shared, “I’ve traveled all over the country in and out of accounting firms and business owners, and really look to have a pulse as to what’s going on out there in the market so we can really fuel business owners to operate in the best fashion possible.”
Most common payroll issues for small businesses
Payroll is a topic that’s shrouded in mystery for many business owners. Payroll can be scary to think or talk about because of the myriad of potential issues. We could spend days picking Heather’s brain about business payroll and ADP payroll services. Instead, we asked Heather to share the most common issues small businesses are seeing regarding payroll.
Complexity and constant change
Business owners and HR professionals have to keep abreast of the complex and rapidly changing legislation. To give some perspective, ADP has had to make a thousand changes to their system based on the 2,000 changes that have occurred in more than 60 countries
over the course of the last several months. The high volume and increased complexity have been unprecedented this year, which can be nearly impossible to navigate alone as a business owner. ADP has been instrumental in helping businesses to solidify 115 billion dollars worth of PPP loans through the reporting they made available.
In-house vs. outsourced payroll services
Business owners, especially when starting their business, want to do payroll themselves because they don’t know the value of an outside service. Sometimes they don’t have many employees and others don’t think they have the money to pay for the expense.
Heather shared her insight on this topic by stating, “Business owners are great at their craft. For example, there are doctors who own their own practice and those exceptional doctors are who I would want to visit if I needed help from a medical professional. But, the complexities that surround payroll are time-consuming and focusing on the payroll can ultimately drain the business owner of time and energy they should be putting into their business.”
Jaime then chimed in about this topic adding, “At PJS & Co. CPAs, we typically recommend outsourcing payroll to experts such as ADP. As CPAs we have the ability to do payroll; it’s just really not our wheelhouse. ADP and companies that provide similar services know how to handle payroll issues. They are up to speed with legislative changes and are familiar with all of the ins and outs of payroll. If we were handling payroll, it would take significant time and effort to dive into things that take the ADPs of the world a fraction of the time. That is why we recommend a partnership with someone like ADP.”
Ultimately, ADP can help business owners simplify because they will help guide you through the process. This kind of service can often be undervalued until the business owner is the one who has to put in the time and effort themselves, which takes them away from other parts of the business. Bringing in a partner to ensure payroll is taken care of, your people are getting paid, and your business is protected offers multiple advantages.
Answering the payroll question, “What is reasonable compensation?”
It’s common to see business owners who are unsure of what to pay themselves. We asked Heather to speak to this and share how ADP can help provide advice in this area. Heather speaks to the pure volume of data to which they can access, “Over time through our data, we started to realize that we could pool from 90 thousand different organizations and more than 30 million records. So… we’ve built a compensation benchmarking explorer tool. If someone is looking for a benchmark number on the client side or even on the accountant side, we allow our clients or their accounting professional to come in and look by industry or job title in geographic area so they can hone in on what that benchmark really looks like from a salary or compensation perspective.”
Having access to this amount of data can help you establish reasonable compensation for not only yourself as the business owner but other members of your team. By leveraging numbers like this, you can ensure you’re within the proper thresholds and running your business appropriately.
How can ADP payroll services benefit businesses?
Most people would agree that payroll isn’t exactly fun. But, the ancillary services are where creativity comes in. That’s where you can position yourself in the market to seek out exceptional people. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so bring people into your company, give them an onboarding experience that’s seamless, pay them, and then on top of that offer them strong benefits. Give them reasons to want to stay with your organization and thrive in their environment.
Time tracking and attendance
With ADP payroll services, time tracking and attendance is built in. This is critical when you look at regulations for exempt versus non-exempt employees. Without this type of service, someone like an office manager would have to compile time and enter it. Compiling and entering time is important, but it also doesn’t need to be a manual process eating up administrative time that could be better spent doing other higher-level tasks. If you can implement a system with time already entered, you can quickly review the reports, click a button, and be ready to process payroll. This is such a time saver and your office manager can be doing other value-added tasks.
Integrations with ADP payroll services
Another great feature of ADP payroll services is the number of time-saving integrations. Currently, there is a tremendous amount of technology available. Business owners tend to need different services, product lines, or technology. Once they seek those and put them together independently, there is a tendency to get a vast amount of data coming from different places and none of the information is communicating. Important data can easily get lost in translation. ADP offers a suite of services that ideally is able to pull all of the information together. This ability to integrate systems is where you ultimately get to design the way you want to work. You have a menu of options to select from based on the needs of your business. Your business can also grow, earn revenue, and add employees which means things may get more complex. But that complexity doesn’t necessarily mean more difficulty for you. These services are built to grow with you.
Another example of integrating payroll is the seamless interface into an accounting package, which fuels the accounting professional with the ability to make good business decisions, and receive guidance based on their accounting needs.
Best practices to attract and retain top talent
We asked Heather to share some best practices to attract top talent and retain exceptional employees. In addition to the compensation aspect she mentioned earlier and paying the industry averages, she recommends a speedy process. Heather adds, “The faster you can find quality talent, get them screened, and have background checks completed, the better.” ADP has a partnership with ZipRecruiter to help facilitate a quick and seamless hiring process. Using tools on the front end to automate as much as possible can contribute to seamlessly getting a candidate working and becoming a productive member of your team as soon as possible.
What’s on the horizon in payroll and HR?
In our final question to Heather, we ask her about what is on the horizon and what we need to be thinking about as business owners when it comes to payroll and HR. Since she is in the know, she had some great insight to share with us regarding hot topics you’ll want to consider.
On-demand pay and payroll services
There is so much on the horizon with technology, automation, and also the gig economy in general. According to Heather, there are 55 million gig workers today, and these are individuals that jump in and engage in a project that they’re passionate about and it aligns with their strengths. She adds “What we are seeing is employers are starting to hire differently. Instead of hiring a full-time employee, they are hiring a gig worker that comes in for this specific job. These workers are so talented at what they’re going to do, they’re going to be able to do it with speed and excellence. When this is the case, pay shifts to on-demand pay.” This transition to an environment where people bank in non-traditional financial transactions like Venmo and instantaneous payments presents a new level of complexity because payroll services are pushed to figure out what that looks like and how that can be facilitated from a payroll engine.
Operating in the new world
We’re all operating in this new world of work, which really could be exciting and is forcing business owners to re-imagine how they operate. Whether it’s restructuring the workplace (redefining roles) or navigating the rapid pace in which we learn and innovate, business owners need guidance. ADP is working on tools and resources to help guide business owners on how best to take care of their employees who are working virtually or are back in an office or business environment.
Heather adds to her sentiment of excitement for what’s to come by stating, “There are a lot of businesses out there that have something in the market that people are craving and they’re running to their organization in droves. And if you’re evolving, that just means that you’re continuing to hire and add some additional aspects to your business. And to me, I think that just paves the way for a level of excitement, as here we are in 2020 doing work very differently than many of us have ever really truly done before.”
Where to get payroll help and other resources
If you’ve heard something today and want to get help or are just tired of doing things on your own, we get it. If you are interested in ADP and the services they offer, visit ADP.com. They have dedicated associates that span the world, as they operate more than 100 countries. Heather explained that ADP engages anyone seeking guidance with a professional and offers an exploratory conversation to understand your needs. From there, they can make strong recommendations. Heather also shared with us that ADP offers, what she calls, “CliffsNotes” on changes happening in the market. These can be found in their SPARK blogs, HR Tip of the Week, and Eye on Washington and can help you gain insight to better position yourself in the market. SPARK blogs are available for anyone, even those who aren’t ADP clients. To receive Eye on Washington, scroll to the bottom of this page, enter your email address to subscribe to SPARK updates, and select the Legislation/Eye on Washington radio button. The Eye on Washington can be accessed by subscribing, but the HR Tip of the Week is currently only available to ADP clients.
If you are looking for additional information regarding HR and strategic planning, please feel free to listen to the HR episode in our strategic planning series.
Conclusion
ADP’s Heather Sperduto was such a wealth of knowledge as our guest! We are grateful she could join us to let us pick her brain and talk about all things payroll. Heather’s credentials at ADP speak for themselves. Today, we started out our episode by learning about Heather’s expertise and her background with ADP. She talked to us about constant changes in payroll and then dove into the topic of businesses handling the payroll in-house or outsourcing it. We asked her what would be considered reasonable compensation and that’s when she scratched the tip of some of the amazing data ADP has at their fingertips. She then talked about services ADP offers, like ADP payroll services, that can really help business owners better manage their time. They can help with almost everything under the sun. As a business owner, think about how beneficial it would be to have someone help with everything from hiring employees all the way to retirement. Heather advised one way, in her opinion, to attract and retain good talent for your business is to have a speedy recruitment and hiring process. Once that happens, you just need to take care of your people. Sounds easy, right? It can be, with help from companies that offer services like ADP. At the end of the episode we tried to keep Heather on her toes by asking her about what’s on the horizon. She was ready to respond and quickly started talking about adapting to the ever changing business environment including the topics of gig economy and on-demand pay.
