The Flexiform fix - a client story

It is no secret that Flexiforms are a major global payroll headache. They involve tedious and time consuming excel spreadsheet work and hours of data entry and checking. When something goes wrong, the data input process starts again and on it goes.

Global payroll professionals at multinational companies around the world have been looking for a solution to this for many years now. They strongly believe that there has to be a better way particularly as we live in a digital age. Manual data entry cannot be the way to process global payroll in 2024, right? You would think so anyway yet so many organizations have no choice but to endure the notoriously frustrating Flexiform process.

The good news is that it no longer has to be this way and the Payslip global payroll control platform has solved this problem. In this article, we will take you through how we fixed it for our client Intuitive Surgical.

What needed fixing?

Intuitive Surgical uses ADP Streamline in multiple countries and like many companies, their payroll teams were required to compile all the input data for ADP streamline into a Flexiform. As many of you know from painful experience, these Flexiforms are messy Excel files with a different layout and set of rules for each country.

And getting all the required info into them in the right way is a tedious and error prone manual data entry task which is required for each pay cycle for each country. It can take hours and even days.

The constant back and forth manual data transfer of data into ADP Flexiforms was a major problem for the payroll team at Intuitive Surgical as they had to continuously gather, organize, re-format and then confirm that their payroll data matched the Flexiform particulars required to be accepted into the ADP system.

Intuitive Surgical were seeking a technology driven solution so that the valuable time of their payroll team could be spent on higher priority work. Too many hours were wasted on manual data entry, and they were very interested to learn about our solution which could automate all the data flows directly across for ADP streamline.

The Payslip way

The Payslip way is to use the Payslip global data model to take data in from all payroll sources and then categorize and standardize this data at a global level. Payslip does this via Integrations as a Service functionality which means the Payslip platform can ingest this data, perform validation checks and then automatically produce the Flexiforms for each country by mapping the data in the database to the required tab and cell in the Flexiform.

During client onboarding phase, all the necessary data was moved onto the Payslip platform, then a Flexiforms was produced for each country by mapping the data in the database to the required tab and cell in the Flexiform. Payslip then automated the delivery of the Flexiforms over to ADP so that the manual upload to the ADP portal step was removed from the process at Intuitive Surgical. Currently there is no manual work for either ADP or Intuitive Surgical- both sides benefit.

84 days a year saved

On the Payslip platform, Intuitive Surgical have integrated 9 different systems (including Oracle Fusion, UKG and Concur) and data from 32 different files flows into Payslip and then across to their local payroll providers in a seamless and automated manner.

This was achieved for 17 countries in just a few months and will result in estimated savings of $374,850 a year across 17 countries.

"Processing payroll for 17 countries all on ADP means 17 different Flexiforms every month. This was a huge amount of tedious manual excel spreadsheet work with a high risk of human error. Payslip has removed all of this work for us, saving the team 7,5 days per month." Marco Sch?nberger Senior Payroll Analyst, Intuitive Surgical

Payslip saved hours of manual work in each payrun across every country where the Flexiform process is followed - coming to a time saving of 84 days a year. The new process completely eliminates manual data entry into Flexiforms - Payslip handles all of the data and fully automates the process. Their Flexiform headache is finally solved.

All the input files need for ADP Streamline are now produced in the required Flexiform format. And ADP send the data to their network of local country payroll providers for payroll calculation and processing just as they had done before.

Intuitive Surgical had no appetite for a rip and replace project and were pleased to discover that this could be avoided using Payslip. They were seeking a solution that allowed them to remain on ADP but spend much less time and resource on the Flexiform process.

Intuitive Surgical have all their data visible to them on Payslip platform and because Payslip automates all the workflows, they know exactly where every payrun is on every pay cycle, how they are tracking against timelines and who is responsible for each payroll task. This is exactly where they want to be in terms of operational efficiency, visibility and control.

If Flexiforms are a part of your global payroll process and causing you to spend way too much time in excel spreadsheet manual entry work, then you should be booking time with the Payslip team today who will show you just how easy it is to remove the Flexiform headache from your payroll.

This article originally appeared on payslip.com