Solving Payroll Processing Headaches

Payroll can be one of the largest headaches for employers. Pay ’n Time Payroll Services, a regional payroll processing company, routinely eliminates this issue for many companies, but had a large headache of its own – meeting a client desire to send individual pay stubs to those companies’ employees using secure email.

Usually, Pay ‘n Time would prepare the pay stubs and email a zip file to its client. The client would then log in, download the file and print the stubs for their employees. However, some clients wanted Pay ‘n Time to provide a direct-to-employee payroll service rather then doing it themselves.

A painful, multiple-step system allowed Pay ‘n Time to meet this need, but it required manually typing in all the email addresses for the employees and was prone to human error. “It was too nerve wracking,” says Pete Bucter, President at Pay ‘n Time. “We were always questioning if we’d sent it to the wrong person — and there’s nothing worse than that in the payroll world.”

Those concerns caused Bucter and his staff to discourage people from using the service; Pay ‘n Time needed to streamline the convoluted process and make it more secure. After approaching a few vendors that couldn’t meet his needs, Bucter decided to move forward with having an Appligent developer create a custom script.

Now the zip file containing the payroll information is sent to an internal email address. There a separate third-party plug-in downloads the file and initiates the custom javascript batch process in Acrobat. This javascript, built by Appligent, extracts each individual payroll document, identifies the recipient and sends the document directly as an email attachment with no user intervention.

“Our new system is designed in such a way that it is impossible for private information to be sent to the wrong person,” says Bucter. “The lynchpin of our automated pay stub delivery system is the script that Appligent created.”

And the new process has dramatically reduced the amount of time and effort to send the pay stubs to employees. Bucter calculates that the old system used to take 20 minutes to send pay stubs to 20 people, but now only takes a few seconds.

“Now instead of costing us money, the service brings in money. We really promote its use now and have been adding a few clients a week,” concludes Bucter. “It is cheaper for the client to outsource to us than to do it themselves — it saves them time and money. It’s a win-win situation all around.”