When you’re buying any piece of business software, presenting your business case to your directors, board or senior management team can often feel like half the challenge. As HR and payroll software will directly impact every one of your employees, your case for investment needs to be watertight and should be detailed enough to prove the reasons why you think your chosen provider is right for your business.
Below, you will find some key advice and top tips for presenting your business case for investment in HR and payroll software that will stop it feeling like a grilling in Dragon’s Den!
Remind them of why change is needed
A key part of your business case for investment in any software solution is reiterating the need for change. Whether this is your first HR and payroll system or it’s an upgrade on a legacy solution; explain to your board exactly why change is necessary.
If you’re growing rapidly, explain how software will help with the on-boarding of these new starters. If you’re hiring, explain how software will streamline your recruitment processes and make it easier for your managers to screen candidates and track applicants.
Start out with an overview of the challenges you’re facing as an HR department and how it is hindering your ability to progress and as such, contribute to business growth and company goals.
Explain how the software meets company goals
When presenting your chosen provider of HR and payroll software to your executives, you must relay to them how this solution meets your company’s short- and long-term goals.
A good business case for investment should outline what you want to achieve and how it aligns with your business’ overall goals. Ideally, your goals should be SMART goals. That is, they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-based. For example, reduce employee churn by 10% in the next 12 months.
When explaining your goals, demonstrate how this investment will directly contribute to achieving these goals and what this ultimately means for your company’s goals.
Define the benefits
It is important to define the benefits you expect to enjoy as a result of investing in HR and payroll software. Explain how this software will benefit your business in terms of process, cost and a more comprehensive business point of view.
In your business case, weigh this up against the cost of doing nothing. Will HR become overwhelmed by administrative tasks, will staff become disengaged, or will your new starters suffer from a lack of on-boarding?
Demonstrate how each of your key stakeholders will benefit: your HR team, your employees, your managers and senior managers and explain how HR outdated processes can be automated, updated and streamlined in a new system.
Make compelling use case examples
While you don’t need to detail every example of how HR and payroll software will be used in practice, it is important you have some powerful case studies that you can share. With compelling use cases, demonstrate examples of tasks that can be automated.
Take off-boarding, for example. Most of the tasks involved in processing an employee’s departure can be automated. As soon as a leaving date is finalised, a series of emails can be triggered, so the relevant teams are informed. Finance will be informed to give them enough time to pay expenses, facilities that so they know they have a work station available and IT a couple of days before so that they can deactivate access to business systems.
For your board, you might share some of the high-level insights into the level of people information that they will have easy access to. From stats on employee churn and costs to stats on absenteeism, recruitment and much more; highlight the ease of accessing these reports compared to your current processes.
Demonstrate ROI
Showcasing the expected return on investment can help to cement your decision making, particularly with your finance and board members. Help your leadership team to understand exactly when they could expect to see the benefits will further help your business case.
Where possible, calculate how much time you’re spending on HR tasks that could be automated and how having an HR and payroll system could reduce this. This can be really impactful for your leadership team; it will demonstrate the value of HR software and the time and cost savings that can be made.
Explain how you arrived at this decision
Investing in HR and payroll software is no small task. As a piece of software that will directly impact all of your employees, how they’re paid, how they interact with HR, request holidays, claim expenses and much more – you need to showcase your evaluation process and prove this is not an impulsive decision.
Share key milestones in your journey to arriving at this decision and prove your process was well-thought-out and logical. Explain why other providers were discounted. Show how you consulted with key team departments from across the business to understand how their processes work and how this could translate into the software. What made this vendor your vendor of choice?
