Erron Stark, ADP
Erron Stark, Division Vice President, Channels for ADP, joins Insightful Accountant's Payroll in-Depth series with some insight on how to determine whether to offer HR and payroll services and selecting a payroll partner.
The COVID-19 pandemic has left many industries reeling. Faced with unprecedented circumstances, businesses continue to look to experts and advisers that can help them remain viable. The community of small and medium-sized businesses in particular has found itself in a new environment where typical HR questions – hiring, firing, furloughs – are directed to their biggest confidants: their accountants.
COVID accelerated the demand for HR services, particularly for issues like employees working remotely or navigating different state laws for the larger number of out-of-state people that businesses have been hiring. When reviewing all the legislative changes that have taken place, especially COVID-related financial assistance programs for businesses, a lot of them involve payroll in some way.
Many accountants have noticed the demand for those services and have turned them into business opportunities for themselves. Yet some accountants also recognize that their current infrastructure around payroll is not sophisticated enough to help their clients. This has exposed the necessity for accountants to find a trusted partner to help them navigate through the questions and needs coming from their clients. If accountants don’t have guidance to help facilitate those questions, their clients are going to find the answers from another resource – and that other resource might also offer accounting services as well
The inclusion of efficient and comprehensive payroll and HR services has become critical to accountants. Before adding these new elements to an accounting practice, there are four key considerations professionals should keep in mind.
1. Would you and your clients prefer the in-house or outsourced model of payroll services?
This is one of those trends that we’ve seen explode during the past 12 months. Some accountants might opt to own all of the payroll and HR work, while others choose to outsource some or all of their clients’ payroll. A key difference in the in-house versus outsourced model is how profitable accountants can make their payroll assistance. There’s a premium to doing it the right way: having more sophisticated mechanisms to produce the payroll in a manner that can give their clients the compliance they need with a better experience.
2. How accessible will payroll data be, and will it have mobility – available anywhere at any time?
This issue comes down to technology. The right technology gives users access to data in real time in the cloud so they can perform analyses and provide reports for clients, both when and how they need it.
3. Once you have access to payroll data, what can you learn from it?
As the U.S. continues to reopen, small and medium-sized businesses are looking to rehire or add new employees to their organization. But the pool of workers is vastly different than it was 18 months ago. Accountants must find a way to crunch payroll data to provide their clients with competitive, up-to-date pay information. For example, ADP has a compensation benchmarking tool offered via the DataCloud system in Accountant Connect. It can show a business the average pay for workers in the system, sortable by factors like geography, industry or tenure – all in real time. Additionally, Accountant Connect’s client insights serves up to accountants their clients’ employee trends and changes in jurisdictions as well as other payroll and HR solutions they use to attract and retain top talent.
Accountants with those kinds of tools become more productive in helping their clients build a compensation strategy that makes clients more competitive. That’s a solid differentiator that can make any firm an indispensable resource for its clients.
4. What kind of tech support – and people support – will you have?
Beyond having analytic tools and someone advising how best to use them, it’s important to have solid tech and human support behind the scenes as well. With our online service connect, employers and accountants don’t need to wait around for answers about when they’re going to get paid. Being able to turn to a partner and get a quick help desk answer for clients is a critical facet of what accountants need to consider incorporating into their payroll practice.
The Finishing Touches
Once you’ve thought over all the considerations above, it’s time to choose a partner. Maybe start small and do a test run. Make sure the new partner has a variety of options for different clients, as they will likely need different solutions.
The partner should support the payroll elements that are needed now, but it should also offer scalability. You might not want, or need, every available tool right away. But down the line you might want to expand the HR elements of your practice to include elements like workers’ compensation, retirement services or even R&D tax credits
Finally, develop an effective strategy to sell your new HR services to existing clients, while simultaneously getting the word out to attract new ones. This might require some marketing spend, but it’ll pay off and some partners, like ADP, offer complimentary marketing collateral and video to help. By being ahead of the trend, accountants can reinforce their positions as trusted advisers and lay the foundation for new revenue streams.
Erron Stark leads the channel strategy for ADP’s accountant, bank, broker, and client channels. With more than 15 years in the HCM industry, Erron has held many leadership roles at ADP with responsibilities including developing programs and managing teams that help accounting professionals and their clients attract top talent, comply with regulations, and achieve their goals.
A native of Staten Island, New York, Erron is an avid golfer when not spending time with his wife Marissa and his three young children or traveling the globe for ADP. Erron and his wife are active fundraisers for their Foundation that benefits pediatric heart disease research.