By Rebecca Jarbo
2020 was a challenging year for so many reasons. With an ever-changing marketplace it was imperative to prioritize operational efficiency everywhere we could. Payroll teams are already busy enough, and in the past year, it was especially critical to identify ways we can eliminate tasks that took up way too much time and energy, especially those without a definitive ROI. For our payroll professionals — disbursing off-cycle payments certainly fit that description.
Off-cycle payments include any payment made, such as bonus, commission, PTO corrections or termination pay, that falls in between pay cycles. We were cutting a handful of manual checks every day, and not only was this time-consuming, but we were also paying between $12-$50 to overnight mail each one.
For some of our employees, off-cycle check payments were a time and financial burden as well. Those who were unbanked or underbanked had to make an extra trip to a check-cashing establishment and pay the check-cashing fee. We estimate that those in this situation spent up to $3,146 in check cashing fees annually.
Fortunately, early in 2020, we began piloting a new technological breakthrough in the world of payroll — CYCLE from DailyPay.
CYCLE is a new product on the DailyPay platform (officially debuting this month). Now when we need to make an off-cycle payment, we simply get the approval to pay, log on to the DailyPay Partner Portal and designate the amount. Our team appreciates the system’s flexibility in that payment amounts can be scheduled or sent out on the same day, depending on what time we approve the payment. It’s also flexible in that employees don’t even need to be enrolled in DailyPay’s on-demand PAY program — we can send CYCLE payments to any employee. Best of all, DailyPay funds the off-cycle payments, so we don’t have to worry about last-minute shoring up of payroll accounts to meet off-cycle pay demands.
By removing the costly process of cutting checks with CYCLE, we estimate that we are saving our company more than $47,000 a year in off-cycle-related costs, not to mention the time we are saving our payroll team time that now can be used in more constructive and strategic ways to improve payroll efficiencies. Also, it’s completely paperless and that has helped during the global health crisis as they don’t have to go into the office to use a check printer.
Our employees have loved how easily the money goes into their accounts, without having to worry about watching the mail for a check and then making a trip just to cash or deposit it into their account. It has really been a true beacon of light in our lives and another dependable way to automate one of our manual processes.
CYCLE supports all direct deposit accounts, including bank accounts, pay cards and general purpose reloadable (GPR) cards.
In a world when we were faced with unprecedented challenges at every turn, it is great that a new innovation solves an old problem in payroll — enabling us to save time and money for ourselves and our hard-working staff.
Payroll Manager at Wireless Vision