Blog post by Markus Matt
Payroll is a complex, time-consuming and often risky business. But why is payroll processing so time-consuming? In the age of highly developed software systems, this question may legitimately be asked.

So far only 80% is automatable
Anyone who deals with the subject of payroll accounting knows the problem: the usual payroll software is available for every standard, but not for much more.
Every special requirement, for example at the company or individual contract level, must either be programmed costly or represented by manual intervention. In addition, there are demanding fields with many variants, such as occupational pension schemes.
On average, individual and special cases in companies affect about 20 % of all employees, but cause 90 % of the work.
In addition, special pay-related circumstances usually have to be handled by specialists who, firstly, cost expensive money and, secondly, are increasingly in short supply on the labour market.
Old Technology, hardly any Innovations
Conventional payroll solutions follow traditional relational data models. If something is changed in a personnel case - for example, unpaid leave - this has some consequential effects in the reporting of Social Insurance and in the compensation.
For each new specification, the administrators have to know what exactly this change triggers and carry it out.
Despite numerous daily entries, nothing must be forgotten or confused. This costs a lot of time and money - errors are inevitable.
The question remains why payroll programmes do not provide a higher degree of automation and why they are not able to relieve the payroller of professional decisions.
Of course, payroll is subject to a multitude of social security, payroll tax and labour law requirements, but this does not explain the inertia of today's payroll solutions.
It seems that against the challenge of constant legal changes, software developers have given far too little thought to the issue of innovation. Note in this context that the majority of vendors present on the market today still follow software concepts from the 1980s. Why has this not changed?
Well, the entry hurdles for newcomers in this field are extremely high, especially in view of the extensive business and technical requirements. It takes a long time before newcomers are able to bring the necessary components together.
And, of course, every software is checked for its payroll suitability at regular intervals. This ties up resources that would actually be needed for a necessary revolutionary overall concept. But sometimes miracles happen.
Ason has found a new Approach
The payroll pioneers of the Swiss start-up Ason have chosen a completely new approach, they work in time values. The core question is always the same: What happened? When is it valid?
This business case management maps the entire administration of follow-up actions, the necessary to-do's are processed automatically.
As a result, the clerks are relieved, the necessary expertise is now part of the programme. This new type of payroll processing can finally scale.
These are the advantages of a business case-based payroll calculation:
the case can be designated as completed after it has been entered
the calculation of the impact is automatic
the business cases can be "stacked", i.e. several business cases with effects on the same wage type are taken into account together even if the start and end dates are different (e.g. change in salary, workload, illness, etc.)
in the case of retroactive entry, a correction is made in the next payroll run
related wage types and bases (e.g. Social security, Unemployment insurance, etc.) are automatically corrected as a result
the calculation of the business cases is carried out according to the predefined formulas and is always calculated identically
the handling and input of the business cases can take place upstream at the employee (e.g. time recording) and does not require any subsequent control by the HR department
With Ason's API service, the way is now clear for infinite scaling of payroll processing.
Comments