Payroll for transient workforces: A new way forward

Getting paystubs and associated payroll documents to the right employee at the right time is a challenge for any business with a sizable workforce.

But the difficulty escalates quickly for those with a high proportion of casual or short-term workers, who are much more likely to change their postal address on a regular basis.

So, what’s the secret to painless payroll document delivery for a transient workforce? 

The transient payroll challenge

Whether for seasonal work in the farming or hospitality industries, specific projects  in construction, mining or entertainment, or flexibility in industries such as healthcare and education, temporary workers are essential to the success of many sectors and businesses.

But for payroll teams trying to unite workforces with their paystubs or tax documents, keeping track of transient workers can be a time-consuming challenge.

Even if a seasonal employee returns to work for you year after year, there’s a good chance they’ll be living somewhere different each time. And if you do manage to get hold of the correct, current address of your short-term employees, there’s no saying they’ll still be living there when the time comes to post out their final paystubs or their annual tax documents.     

All this means a lot of wasted time and effort keeping records up to date, tracking down employees when their mail is returned, and answering queries from workers who have never received their documents. 

The secret to simplicity revealed

If the postal addresses of casual workers are so tough to keep track of, you might think the secret to painless document distribution is to switch to emailing documentation via attachments or links. But transient workers may regularly change email addresses and phone numbers too.

What’s more, email is an unreliable delivery method for important and private documents. They are easily accidentally deleted, sent to the wrong address, or relegated to spam or junk folders. And let’s not even get started on how insecure email is as a channel. Responsible businesses shouldn’t encourage employees or casual workers to click  links in emails.

The real secret to painless payroll is to put your employees in control of their own information and empower them to self-serve. 

You can achieve this by sharing  payroll documents via a personal, secure digital space, which only the intended recipients can access online or via a mobile app. With the Payreq secure-by-design platform, all you need to do is upload payroll documents as pdfs. Then these are automatically shared to your employee’s private sharing space, and a notification is sent when the document is available to access. 

There’s no more tracking down or chasing up transient workers – they can just access their information whenever they need it, from wherever they happen to be in the world. 

Built for workers on the move

The Payreq platform is ideal for transient workers. Once they’ve signed up for a free account, which takes a matter of seconds, it’s theirs for life and can stay with them as they move from one employer to the next. So you can reach them in their secure and private digital space for years after they’ve moved on from your business.

Many large global organisations use the Payreq platform for payroll. So there’s a good chance a worker will move on to another business that also uses Payreq to share their paystubs. 

And if they come back to you for the next season? Well you’re all good to go.

Payreq makes life easy for casual workers in other important  ways too.

Filling in a tax return or proving income for a loan application can be particularly complex for transient workers that are regularly changing jobs. But with Payreq all the documents they need from every employer can be stored securely in one place, for a period of seven years. They’ll never miss a paystub, they won’t need to keep paper records and they won’t need to call you to ask for document reprints.    

Putting employees in control is the secret to painless payroll paperwork, and it benefits your business as well as your transient workforce. 

To find out more about transforming  your payroll processes, check out  our guide, Payroll power to the people.