How Employee Benefits Platforms Can Help With Financial Planning
Firms need to carefully plan out their finances, often months in advance, to ensure that they do not run into cash flow issues. If they don’t, they run the risk of running into cash flow squeezes where they don’t have enough money to pay all their stakeholders – including employees – even if they are profitable.
Unfortunately, planning is challenging. Firms don’t always get it right. They might think that they have sufficient cash on hand to pay all the wages and benefits they’ve promised employees, but they don’t. They then end up using high-interest unsecured debt to tide them over.
In this post, we take a look at how employee benefits platforms can help in this regard. These pieces of software are powerful digital tools that make financial planning easier. They show your business where it stands (and how its financial circumstances are liable to change in the future).
Reduce administration associated with benefits planning
The amount of time your business spends on benefits planning can be significant. It takes HR staff many hours to work out what you owe staff and how to pay it to them. Doing it manually is a time-consuming process and you can’t always see your financial position in real-time.
Benefits platforms change this dynamic. They show you all the latest information regarding your benefits position and generate reports every month to see where you stand. With so much automation built into the software, HR staff can reorientate their activities to other aspects of your business. You can also use this to deliver employee benefits packages.
For instance, most benefits platforms come with task widgets that show HR staff the actions they need to take next. These let them automate things like benefits approvals.
See how much you’re spending on benefits
Employee benefits platforms are also helpful for tracking how much your benefits packages are costing you right now, and what they’re likely to cost in the future. You can see things like benefits take-up, giving you a more accurate forecast of long-term expenses associated with your programmes.
Automated processes make it easier to display the right information to the right people. You’re often able to avoid spiralling costs from payroll reporting and supplier paperwork, simply by integrating your existing systems into an employee benefits platform.
Check who is eligible for which benefits
Employee benefits platforms also make it considerably easier to see who is eligible to receive benefits within your organisation. You might notice that only a small number of colleagues are taking up the benefits, in which case you might want to change your approach. (For instance, staff might not be taking advantage of gym membership discounts). You can also view which benefits are the most popular and what they are likely to cost as you go forward.