Being a business owner is not too dissimilar to being a parent: In both instances, you’ve created this thing, either a child or a business, that, eventually, will come to largely function independently, but at first requires a lot of time and attention to take care of it. You must raise your business from the infancy of its concept into the full-grown adult of a well-established business. Of course, like parenting, running a business isn’t easy, especially when it comes to running businesses with multiple locations. While one location of your business may not run around your living room chasing after one of your other locations, both of which are screaming at the top of their lungs, there are still several unique challenges and obstacles that come with multi-site operations, especially when it comes to ensuring consistency across those locations.
At Payday HCM, we’re very familiar with the particular challenges of multi-site operations. We work with and have worked with many different clients who operate multiple businesses in multiple cities or states and need to ensure a number of different things are the same between locations, things like onboarding procedures, employee policies, self-service portals, employee trainings, and more. You also need to work to ensure legal compliance across all of your different locations, accounting for the rules and regulations that may vary from state to state. There’s a lot of room for error—luckily, we’ve spent 40-plus years honing our multi-state functionality craft to ensure each one of our clients gets the same service regardless of where they’re at.
So, in this article, we’ll be going over how Payday HCM offers payroll and HR services to businesses with multiple locations. We’ll first go over what makes multi-site functionality unique, and why businesses with more than one location might seek out a payroll service provider (and the unique challenges that they face). Then, we’ll dive into the specifics of the kinds of services Payday offers, focusing on how we provide consistency and functionality across locations. This will provide an overall picture of how Payday’s core services are designed to work with multi-site businesses.
In this article, you will learn:
- The Challenges of Payroll and HR for Businesses with Multiple Locations
- How Does Payday Better Serve Multi-Site Workplaces?
- Should Businesses with Multiple Locations Outsource Their Payroll and HR?
The Challenges of Payroll and HR for Businesses with Multiple Locations
To start, we’ll go over the kinds of unique obstacles businesses with multiple locations face when it comes to payroll and HR.
Consistency In Policies and Procedures
Probably the biggest challenge that businesses with multiple locations face is consistency. Whether your locations are blocks apart or on opposite sides of the country, ensuring that all of your locations not only follow the same procedures but also share the same company culture is something businesses continually work towards.
The same can be said for payroll and HR. There are so many variables—time clocks, scheduling, hiring and onboarding, workplace policies—that are open to possible interpretation or change between locations, making sure all of them are doing the same things in the same way can often feel like a full-time job in and of itself.
Communication Between Properties and Scalability
And securing consistent business operations between locations largely depends on accurate and timely communication, whether that be between the locations themselves or between a payroll service provider and each location. What is being communicated, how it’s being communicated, when it’s being communicated—these all can create small discrepancies in how things are done from location to location.
Communication and consistency both play a role in whether or not a business is able to grow and scale at the rate that it can. Without these foundational elements, it may not be possible for a single-site business to grow into a multi-site one, or for a multi-site business to maintain the level of growth that allowed it to become a business with multiple locations.
How Does Payday Better Serve Multi-Site Workplaces?
We understand the challenges in consistency, communication, and scalability that come with operating a business with multiple locations, and we’re able to offer services that are designed to meet those challenges.
Payroll Services for Businesses With Multiple Locations
Payroll, like a business, involves a lot of separate moving parts working in tandem to create a larger operational whole. Across multiple locations, these individual components can have small variations, creating inconsistencies in business operations. With Payday HCM, our payroll services are designed with consistency in mind, ensuring each one of your locations does payroll the same way—from the first punch-in to the last check delivered.
We achieve this through a few different methods: utilizing the same HRIS and self-service platform, isolved, across locations; assigning a dedicated client service team to each client, ensuring personalized and accurate customer service; and dedicated training on our software platform for employees and managers, ensuring equal understanding of the tools available.
Communication and Compliance Across Multiple Locations
Of course, when it comes to businesses operating in multiple states, there are variances between certain processes that need to exist in order to meet certain local rules and regulations, and to maintain compliance between locations. Outsourcing your payroll and HR functions can help to ensure these differences are accounted for, securing compliance while still achieving consistency within your processes.
Now, it’s easy to maintain these lines of communication and level of consistency across a fixed number of businesses—what about ensuring these services maintain the same level of quality for businesses set to scale or grow? Our HCM services are designed to do just this, scaling your payroll and HR services with custom-built plans and dedicated client service representatives to onboard any new locations quickly and accurately.
Should Businesses with Multiple Locations Outsource Their Payroll and HR?
The question remains, though: if I can perform my payroll and functions in-house, even with multiple locations, what advantages does outsourcing provide?
Multi-Site Workplaces: Advantages to Outsourcing Payroll, HR
Running a business with one location isn’t easy—running a business with multiple locations? Let’s just say it’s a lot of work. Overall, growth is a great thing, but you may find yourself overwhelmed with just performing the day-to-day administrative tasks necessary to keep your business running. This can take time away from finding ways to continue to further your business’s growth.
Outsourcing your payroll, human resources, and employee benefits management can help ensure those day-to-day tasks are taken care of while giving you time to focus on the bigger picture operations of your business. It can be a method for relieving administrative burden while ensuring those day-to-day tasks are still being completed at a high level.
What Multi-Site Workplaces Should Look For In A Payroll Provider
When it comes to outsourcing, there are a few key features that businesses can keep in mind when it comes to looking for a provider. These include:
- Consistency across properties: Same general ledger setup, time clock configuration, applicant tracking system and hiring processes.
- Multi-state capability: Ability to handle varying tax laws (New York complexity vs. Texas simplicity, for example).
- Accessible client service representatives: dedicated teams that understand your business and each of its locations, available when you need them.
- Scalability and options for growth: software and service that can expand with your business.
Of course, each business is still unique. Don’t be afraid, when exploring provider options, to ask them questions about your business’s operations and their ability to meet those challenges, especially when it comes to multi-site operations.
Payroll and HR Services For Your Business—Regardless of Location
We can’t say it enough times: running a business is difficult. Between the day-to-day operations and the larger-scale efforts to grow and expand, there can be a lot to keep track of. This also means there can be a lot that can slip through the cracks, especially when operating a business with multiple locations. Try as you may, you can’t be in multiple places at once. So, until someone invents a reliable method for making identical clones of oneself, you’ll just have to settle for the next best thing: outsourcing your payroll, HR, and employee benefits administration. Of course, maybe don’t put too many eggs in the cloning-device-invention basket.
Whether you’re running a small mom-and-pop shop or a hotel group with multiple locations across the country, finding a payroll and HR service provider that delivers consistent results and excellent service is hard to come by. Even still, finding the right payroll partner can help your business unlock its full potential, lifting the administrative burden from your shoulders and allowing you to focus on growing your business. With Payday HCM, you’ll receive full-service treatment regardless of whether you’re a new business owner or you’ve been operating for 20-plus years. Discover how Payday HCM’s payroll, HR, and benefits services can transform how your business does business.
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