One of the advantages of being a seasoned professional is that we have the memory of how we worked before we had cloud technology. It helps us appreciate what modern technology has done for us. Most millennials cannot conceive manual time sheets, payday trips to the bank, and having an army of people to audit payroll.

ERP Payroll systems of the 1990s streamlined timekeeping and payroll processes, but much of the tedium remained. Software built on relationship databases was clunky and hard to use. We still had a lot of manual data entry, long processing times, and endless poring over page after page of reports to find and correct errors.

Long after talent management moved to the cloud, Finance, Payroll, and IT guarded their legacy platforms. Until recently the suggestion to move payroll to the cloud met with resistance. Most of the pushback came from security concerns and the fear of losing control.

Workday® changed that perception when they launched Finance and HR in the Cloud in 2006 using fast in-memory processing and an object model approach to programming. The object-oriented concept was not new, but applying it to core financial operations was a bold move.

Now that cloud technology has matured enough to prove its security and stability, cloud payroll implementations are growing. Workday® Payroll has 757 customers, of which 510 are live on the platform.[1] Also, Workday® has the integrations and software to manage any third party payroll worldwide.


Payroll management services in the Cloud gives us solid advantages over legacy platforms.

• Lower, more predictable cost. Maintenance and upgrades are included in the subscription.
• Scalability. Workday® Finance handles organizational changes with ease.
• A consumer-grade interface in plain business language instead of cryptic database terms.
• Frequent updates. Instead of selling expensive version upgrades, Cloud vendors update their software regularly, and competition in the market drives constant innovation.
• Automatic regulatory updates. Legacy systems required IT to apply patches to update regulatory changes. Cloud vendors can push them out to all customers. You can have peace of mind knowing you are always in compliance.
• Robust dashboards. You can run the processes, view and analyze the results, and make adjustments and corrections before you commit them.

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