In today's challenging financial climate, businesses should constantly be seeking innovative ways to improve employee engagement in their financial wellbeing and foster a sense of empowerment among their workforce. One often-overlooked aspect of employee engagement is payroll management.
Traditional payslips often fail to capture the attention of employees, making it challenging for them to fully understand the various elements of their pay and deductions. With the introduction of interactive payslips, organisations can revolutionise the way employees perceive their payroll.
For employees, better understanding of their payroll through interactive payslips leads to improved engagement, better financial management and improved overall financial and mental wellbeing.
What are interactive payslips?
Interactive payslips are broken down into an easy-to-read graphical view, which helps employees see all the elements of their pay and deductions. PayCaptain provides interactive payslips through the PayCaptain mobile app. They give employees access to a clear breakdown of all elements of their payroll in an easy-to-understand format. Graphical payslips also include help icons to explain the different elements of pay and how it’s calculated.
What are the benefits of interactive payslips?
Clearer understanding of pay and deductions: Interactive payslips provide employees with a refreshing, easy-to-read, graphical representation of their pay and deductions. By presenting information in a more visually appealing manner, interactive payslips help employees have a better understanding of their earnings, tax and National Insurance and other deductions.
Visual representations such as charts, graphs and infographics, along with informative help icons, enable employees to quickly grasp information that they might previously have found complex. Interactive payslips improve employees’ understanding of their payroll and reduces confusion.
Greater financial awareness: When employees have a clearer understanding of their payroll, they’re more likely to take an active interest in their financial wellbeing.
Interactive payslips are a tool for employees to delve deeper into their financial situation and they encourage them to check their income, deductions and savings. By helping employees understand their pay better, they gain insight into how their hard work translates into their take-home earnings.
Encourages employees to save: Another significant advantage of interactive payslips is that they encourage employees to prioritise savings. With a clearer understanding of their earnings and deductions, employees can better assess their disposable income and identify opportunities for saving.
Employees can proactively allocate a portion of their salary towards savings, pensions or investments, increasing their financial security and stability for the future. This shift towards proactive savings direct from payroll can significantly impact employees' financial resilience and reduce financial stress.
Reducing financial stress is highly beneficial for both employees and employers. Financial stress is one of the leading causes of absenteeism in the workplace, so by reducing financial stress, employers will see reduced levels of absence, a happier workforce and increased productivity.
Improved financial resilience: Understanding the different elements of their pay and deductions empowers employees to make more informed financial decisions and develop better financial planning strategies.
Armed with a better understanding of their finances, employees can identify areas where they can make adjustments or optimise their expenditure. With interactive payslips, employees are more likely to take proactive steps towards their financial resilience, such as setting aside savings, creating budgets or seeking professional financial advice.
Promoting employee satisfaction and engagement: Interactive payslips have the potential to significantly impact employee satisfaction and engagement. When employees feel more in control and knowledgeable about their pay, it enhances their overall job satisfaction and sense of fairness within the organisation.
Providing better tools to help employees with their finances demonstrates that the employer values transparency and cares about employees' financial wellbeing. As a result, employees become more engaged, motivated and committed to their work, leading to increased productivity and a more positive work culture.
How does PayCaptain help?
Interactive payslips are available through the PayCaptain mobile app. Over 95% of employees that are paid by PayCaptain use the mobile app to access their payroll information. This is an extremely positive statistic and demonstrates how employees are more engaged with their payroll when they’re paid by PayCaptain.
Once there are multiple published payslips, employees are also able to see a comparison with previous payslips and details of any changes between pay runs.
PayCaptain has adopted the Plain Numbers approach, which means that employers are able to better communicate with their employees, giving them an opportunity to make more informed decisions about their finances by simplifying language.
For employees who don’t wish to use the app, PayCaptain is also accessible via a web browser. If they need to provide salary evidence for financial institutions, for example, they can still download and print a PDF version of their payslip on either the app or website.
For more information about interactive payslips, check out our short video here -> CEO Simon Bocca introduces interactive payslips
But PayCaptain doesn’t stop there. The mobile app not only has interactive payslips but also hosts a wide array of functionality that really enhances employees’ payroll experience:
Payment splitting: This functionality gives the employee the ability to set up automatic payday payments in the app, directly from their net pay. This eliminates the risk of paying essential bills late or missing them entirely.
Employees can set up automatic payday payments to their mortgage or landlord, as well as credit cards or loan repayments. Payments for household or personal bills can be set up as well as payments made to friends or family members.
Money planning tool: This functionality allows employees to calculate their income and expenditure and enables them to create a personalised budget. This gives the employee a much better view of outgoings and the disposable income they have once their financial commitments are met.
Having the knowledge of incoming, outgoings and disposable income will allow the employee to plan their spending better and, in conjunction with other tools in the PayCaptain app, may enable them to build some savings for improved financial resilience.
Savings: Employees can pre-plan the amount to save and it's automatically transferred from net pay. This builds some resilience for times of financial hardship. As the interest rate continues to rise, in an attempt by the Bank of England to slow down spending – the value of savings is increasing.
Personalised financial guidance: Trusted, impartial and confidential financial guidance from Money Helper can be accessed directly through the PayCaptain app. Money Helper is an organisation that offers help and support, confidential advice and guidance for those struggling with their finances. They have a range of tools and calculators on their website and can signpost users towards help with the cost of living, debt advice and management.
On demand pay: On-demand pay is where an employee can access up to 50% of their accrued earnings ahead of pay day. This can help ease the burden of a financial shortfall and help employees to meet their short-term financial obligations.
With PayCaptain, monthly paid employees can also ease immediate financial pressures by using the automatic Weekly Advances feature. Employees can access up to £50 of their accrued earnings each week, paid directly into their bank account every Monday morning.
These advances can be helpful for employees to manage part of their budget on a weekly basis, whilst keeping keep funds protected for their bills and direct debits at the end of the month.
Emergency cash: As well as the Weekly Advances feature, PayCaptain also gives employees the option to access up to £200 of emergency cash, as long as the salary has been accrued. This allows employees to deal with emergencies when they have no savings to cover them.
Pensions: Pensions allow employees to make better provision for later life. Auto-enrolment into workplace pensions functionality is included in the PayCaptain solution, with both employers and employees making contributions. Employees also have the option to increase their contributions or make ad hoc payments direct from their payroll to increase their savings for the future.
Employees can view their pension pot directly from the PayCaptain app so they have better visibility of how much money they’re saving for their retirement.
Benefits calculator: PayCaptain has a handy benefits entitlement checker which is free to use for employees on the mobile app. The entitlement checker allows the user to anonymously enter the relevant personal information. Only the user’s postcode is needed - for cross-referencing against local authority benefits that may be available.
The benefits entitlement checker takes the user through a series of questions. Upon completion, the user is shown the benefits that they may be entitled to, based on the answers they’ve given. Links to applications forms for potential benefits are also provided to the user.
In summary, interactive payslips present businesses with an excellent opportunity to engage their employees in the payroll process. By offering clear and visually appealing views of pay and deductions, employees become more engaged with their payroll and gain a better understanding of their financial situation. This empowers them to make more informed decisions and better financial plans for their future.
Improved financial awareness leads to enhanced financial resilience, increased job satisfaction and a more engaged workforce. As businesses strive to support their employees through the challenging financial environment, interactive payslips are a valuable tool to help develop better financial wellbeing and employee engagement.
