#HRTechChat: Heike Wiesner and Alastair Pride on Payroll Trends and Innovation at Unit4

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In this episode of #HRTechChat, Dylan Teggart sits down with Heike Wiesner, Global Sales Growth Director HCM, and Alastair Pride, Managing Principal Consultant, of Unit4 to explore the evolving role of payroll as a strategic business driver.

They discuss how cloud migration, integrated ERP systems, and innovations like Unit4’s Payroll Navigator are transforming payroll from a back-office function into a core asset for workforce planning, compliance, and employee trust. From real-time visibility to faster, smarter deployments, Heike and Alastair share how Unit4 is helping organizations simplify complexity, boost efficiency, and adapt to shifting workforce demands.

If you think payroll is just about getting people paid, it’s time to think bigger.

Learn more about how Unit4 can help your organization here: Unit4 HCM software for payroll management

Our #HRTechChat Series is also available as a podcast on the following platforms:

See a service missing that you use? Let our team know by emailing research@3SixtyInsights.com.

Transcript:

00:00:00 Dylan Teggart

Everyone. It’s Dylan Teggart. I’m here with another 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat podcast, this time brought to you by Unit4. Today I’m speaking with Heike Wiesner and Alastair Pride Pride. Both are members of the Unit4 team based in the UK, little bit about Unit4. Before we start, they are based in Utrecht, Netherlands, up with a strong presence in Europe and North America, focusing on industries like education, public sector, nonprofits and professional. Kisses and specializing in enterprise software solutions or enterprise resource planning, ERP and related business applications. And we’ll be talking a little bit about today about modern payroll, about Unit4 and about the trends they’re seeing. Thank you both for joining me.

00:00:46 Alastair Pride

Thank you, Dylan Teggart.

00:00:48 Dylan Teggart

So do you. Yeah, likewise. So tell me a bit about yourselves and either 4, what did I miss in that intro there?

00:00:54 Heike Wiesner

Hey, I’m. Hey everybody, I’m Heiko Vista. I’m the global growth director for HCM here at Unit4 and I spent give or take the last eight years now in the in the world of Human Capital Management, looking to help organizations to to turn their payroll and their HR solutions from a back office function more. Into a strategic asset. Now when it comes to Unit4, we like to think that we are helping organizations to reimagine how people and organizations work together. Mind, our platform brings HR, payroll and finance into a seamless system. Dylan Teggart, you you touched upon that, right? So we really believe in supporting organizations just with a single solution to help them simplify compliance, but also to to help people to deliver their best work today. I like to to focus on sharing how smart HCM technology can really help organizations, Dr. growth and boost engagement. And also sort of respond to these fast changing environment that we are finding ourselves in today. Say if we think about systems and people working together and not. In isolation or or. Systems even dictating. What work should look like then? Great things can happen, so I’m really excited of being here and thanks for having us.

00:02:24 Alastair Pride

The next thank you for hockey. So I’m Alistair pride, like Dylan Teggart said based in the UK, I really focus on payroll implementation. So my role within Unit4 is taking customers from not using the software to using the software and then also for those. Customers that are already using the software in how to do that better, how to improve things and how to add things on and expand their their offering. So I’m really focused on payroll within the ERP, working alongside finance and HR colleagues as we’re. Doing that and that’s my role, really. That’s complete focus on payroll.

00:03:04 Dylan Teggart

Alright, well thank you both for joining me. Yeah, payroll is one of those things I wanted to touch on today. There’s a lot of new payroll trends emerging. Because favorable one of those things where if it’s not perfect every time. You as the worker, you know, getting paid tend to remember it. You don’t really think about your pay until there’s a mistake in incorrect payroll immediately. Makes you erode trust in your employer, especially if it happens repeatedly, and especially if it’s early on in the employment. And this can kind of be at any role or any. Level. And what we’ve been seeing at 360 is at an high mobility or high demand fields, especially for hourly workers, payroll strategy and consistency can be what keeps people around. But that happens also in every industry. So in this world of immediate gratification, where people want to be paid on time, want more flexibility? What are the trends that you’re seeing and what are the what is 2025? What is payroll in 2025? Look like see.

00:04:09 Heike Wiesner

Great question. I think Needless to say that everybody is is kind of started to move their parallel operation into the cloud and we’ve we spent years of of having legacy systems of having integration and high cost data synchronization issues. I think a lot of organizations have have helped fast in the past to kind of really. Not disrupt, right? Like you said, sort of it. It always feels like, oh, my, I’m touching payroll. But you know, how can I can I secure? The Piran afterwards. But I think what we are seeing also in our mid market base now is that. Payroll is really having the power to substantiate and to underpin sort of some of the strategic business decisions like whether or not they say is to to look at. How do I deploy my workforce? Where is the cost sitting? How can I take the administrative burden out of the the equation but also sort of these real need for? A single source of the truth across the totality of the business functions. If you if you integrate payroll into a finance system, you need to maintain sort of the the connection points. You are potentially also having different views of the same data. Whether or not you talk to HR or you talk to finance. So I think that’s really the. The majority of what we have been seeing over the past few years.

00:05:31 Alastair Pride

Yeah, I would. I would echo that. Really, I couldn’t. I can’t add too much more to that from what I just said. I think move to cloud is really important. I think that’s seeing that across the, the, the software industry. And I I think as an implementation type person, somebody being with payroll, I think my message to any. Anybody using softwares, you’ve got to stay on the latest version if you want the latest innovations. If you want the latest tools, you can’t be on a 10 year old version. So I think moving into the cloud and moving on to the latest version of the software that you’re on is is really key and that’s not, that’s not really a payroll point. That’s a general point about system maintenance. And and I think going back to the introduction that you gave and I think is exactly right about payroll, is that the thing that I find most exciting about payroll is. It is critical you do need to pay people. People are people do want to turn up and do a do the job, but they want to be paid for it and for me that makes it more exciting, more nerve wracking at times as well because when you’re in a go live and customers are about to use that software, then you’ve got to get it right. There’s almost a 0 tolerance within payroll. With the software. But I think with something like uniform payroll having that kind of robust reliable calculation engine is what you’re trying to achieve. What you’re trying to start using. So I think that’s really really key. That’s kind of a fundamental point before you even get on to what you’re seeing in the market and the and the future things you’re seeing happening.

00:07:08 Dylan Teggart

Yeah. And then I kind of want to dive into that a little bit. You know, with all this, we just talked about how is. Unit4 adjusting to it what? Can you walk me through? Unit force payroll engine?

00:07:19 Alastair Pride

Yeah. Love. I’ll take that one. Like, if you’re, if you’re happy with that. Yeah. So I see. I see our payroll engine, I kind of separate it into two different things, really. I separate it in. To call payroll and localized payroll and they’re they’re two different things to me. Although the product is, there is obviously only one product, but I separate into those two things. So what do I mean by core payroll for me that is the very heart of the unit for payroll software, because if you boil. Payroll down and you really analyze what it is. You have lots of data incoming, whether it’s from employees, HR, finance, governments, all of that you have the data incoming if you look. At the outputs. You have data going out in reports or maybe being interfaced to external bodies or lock the compliance information. So if you don’t come into the center and say what’s at the heart of everything you’re doing here is calculations is is robust data storage in a really highly organized structure. When I say core payroll in my mind I’m thinking about that. Heart and at the heart of the unit for payroll engine is this really powerful calculation engine and really structured and robust storage of data. And you’ve got to have that right to be able to do to allow the data to flow in in a structured way and also the data to flow out in the organized, structured compliant way that you want it to do. You need to have that heart in place. And so when I talk about core payroll, I think that’s at the very heart of the uniform system, but then localized payroll, when I say what? I say we have a localized payroll. What I mean by that is Unit4 localizes payroll in certain jurisdictions. So specifically, we look at Sweden. Norway, the UK and North America, and in those countries we have add-ons to that core payroll software, which is add-ons which keep it compliant with payroll in those countries. So specifically tax and then Unit4 will commit to keeping that up to date. That’s the localized payroll. Really simply, obviously there’s lots more processes and other things that people can use in those countries to do the job easily. That’s the that’s the point of payroll. But I think those two things coming together within the Unit4 system make up really the beating heart of our of our payroll software. This really powerful calculation engine. Really strong and robust data storage and that’s key to everything.

00:09:48 Heike Wiesner

That’s real cool, Alistair. I’m. I’m wondering whether or not you can kind of maybe look a little bit also into sort of this connection between the payroll data and how they then kind of flow back into our world of finance and how they connect back to the general Ledger to kind of try and and give a little bit more insight to you. To our listeners. To what that looks like.

00:10:07 Alastair Pride

Yeah, no, you’re right. But that is the the the essence of of of ERP really is that you’ve got this single source of data. You are only using things once, whether it’s come from HR or finance or whether it’s. From you’re using that data once an hour. Payroll software does that, but that integration into into the general Ledger, I call it an integration, but it’s not a separate piece of software. It’s not an external tool that does that within our within our software, it’s it’s a seamless move of your payroll transactions into the. General Ledger is linked and payroll every period. Every time that payroll is run. Once you commit that payroll, those transactions are then available in your general Ledger. And I think that’s really powerful and it’s something that I see when customers are doing that on a biweekly basis or a monthly. Places and they’re kind of pressing that button. Pressing that payroll button and committing their payroll. Those numbers are going into the general Ledger and you kind of take it for granted. You take it for granted that it just happens within the within the Unit4 system. And I think that that is really powerful. It’s certainly a lot easier than watching things that may be passing information from one system to another and may be falling over. Maybe being subject to security issues and all of that kind of worry that you might have if it wasn’t integrated.

00:11:27 Dylan Teggart

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And is is that where you see the? Future of payroll solutions going and where do you see? Payroll solutions moving for the rest of 2025 and beyond.

00:11:41 Alastair Pride

Let let let me start off on that and then I’ll hand over to you because I know that you can probably explain some of this a lot better than me. But one of the things. Obviously, everybody is talking about and everybody’s looking at is is artificial intelligence. And I for me in a payroll person, I’m doing day-to-day payroll with customers and for me, I think I, I don’t even know what that means to me. I it’s kind of like one of those things that’s off there in the distance and it’s in the news being talked about. But but we’ve got. Tools and things coming along that are based on on AI and one of the things I’m specifically thinking about, which Hiki will be able to talk about better is payroll navigate. It but before. Talking, she talks about that, I think. One of the key points to to that comes back to what I was just saying is that for AI to be really. Effective. Those things I mentioned that highly structured, organized data and those processes in one place you need that in place and but I I don’t know how you with it’s easier if I leave you to say something more about pay or another date. But I think the foundation. Within an ERP system of having that date in one place and highly structured and highly organised is essential for this future that we’re looking at now. When people talk about.

00:12:51 Heike Wiesner 

AI no, absolutely Alistair, and I think you’re right. Applying AI on on a non existing or fragmented. Baseline is always going to give you a a similar result back, right? So that it’s never going to be 100% accurate. I think for us and when it comes to paranormal Gator, you touched on it, we are super excited about parameters. So. So let me try and unravel a little bit to you how it came about and and what we were thinking. And and what send us onto this journey if you like, right? Say. If we look and and take a step back into sort of normal parallel operations, we are sort of sitting there and saying parallel has always been seen as a as a back office function, right? It needed to be right. It needed to be accurate. But the reality of the situation that we’ve seen is that. About 65% of payroll teams. And processes often are still manual. They’ve got some level of intervention. They’ve got as a result of page errors. Potentially missteps that are kind of. Coming through. So when we kind of looked into what could this future look like, could we actually build a solution that we could give to somebody who may have translated payroll in the past but but really hasn’t got a great deal of insight and it’s it’s certainly not familiar with all of the steps of the process. So we kind of. Imagined it from the point. Of view that we say. It’s a dashboard. Right. And it’s laying the foundation to kind of. Really, putting all of the workflows into a super seamless kind of flow and it’s taking the users through. And so when we we are actually talking about parallel navigator, we are actually saying. We want to give the payroll teams a real time view of all of the pay groups that they are actually having to to complete and to transact and to take them on a guided step by step. Journeys through that process. So we’re taking out the guesswork. We are sort of taking out sort of any error for sort of missteps and we are sitting very clear priorities and and ultimately a faster sort of resolution time. So when we think about that and you, you were to imagine that you’ve got a dashboard with all of your pay. Groups present what we are then able to do is to show you which input factors, said Alistair. You were talking about earlier, have been missed. Right. So we can actually sit down. Think Ohh there is a timesheet missing for high gear or there is a tax cut missing for all. And with that information that warning. That. If you like response from the system coming back, the admin is able to literally look right into that particular kind of issue that has been identified, get transported into the back office and the back end of the the payroll. Solution fix it and rerun payroll and that issue will disappear provided of course they’ve put the. Right data in right? But. That being said, so we are hugely, hugely excited about. And the level of automation, the level of guidance that we can bring. And I think excitingly also we are in a place that our customers will be able to, let’s just imagine that I’ve run the payroll or I’ve partially completed it and heaven forbid time sick tomorrow for somebody else to kind of retrace my steps. It’s quite hard. They don’t have to. Impera navigated because that dashboard, that view of where the last person is left off is fundamentally there for me to pick up. Site.

00:16:27 Alastair Pride

I knew you’d explain it better than. Me.

00:16:31 Heike Wiesner

But I try I try.

00:16:33 Alastair Pride

No, I think it is. It is really exciting as well and I think I think a lot of the time you you hear people talking about user experience that’s often focused on the employees using the system and is it easy and intuitive for employees to use and I think. The fact that this is an an improved user experience for a payroll team, I think that’s really exciting because payroll teams often feel like we sit in the dark corner, often overlooked and neglected, and so to have this new way of working, an innovative way of working, one that sets things up for the future, I think is really exciting.

00:17:07 Dylan Teggart

Yeah, absolutely. As as you both mentioned, it’s. Things are changing with payroll, you know, as we both said it was used to be a back office function, but now it’s more of a strategic resource. You know it’s integrating with performance. Overall trends, cost analysis. Because like as I was saying earlier can sometimes be a make or break situation. You know, you don’t want to lose that trust on something that could be so easily avoided. If you have the right systems in place. And also you don’t want to create more work. And I think you know what you mentioned with payroll. Navigator is really cool. Where? You know the day ends. Maybe you’re sick the next day. Someone’s got to pick up the slack. But people still got to get paid at the end of the day because Friday’s coming up and. If payroll is late, no one really cares. The reason they just want to know why it’s late and why they can’t, you know, have a good weekend anymore. You know, from the trends I look at my at my practice, the time to payroll, you know employee experience is a big one. Optimization of you know tied into that experience and HR technology addressing all those. You know, how do you feel? You know, you mentioned how you know 4 is reacting to this, but how do you feel the market in general is reacting to this where where are people positioning themselves and? You know, when it comes to aligning payroll and HR strategies. What are the tip of the spear? You know, movements that are people are going for. And what are you seeing that uniform is doing?

00:18:39 Heike Wiesner

I think it’s it’s a combination. So if we touched a little bit upon the. Integration of systems or better still and native connection between different systems, we are seeing increasingly that our customers are coming to market with a much broader need to address their technology stack then they have ever before. I’d say we have. The last couple of years at at Unit4, we’ve really focused to determine what is the right journey to the cloud. I think everybody knows we need to move. Everybody knows what the pressure looks like. Everybody is aware of. The hybrid environment of the economic pressures that are. Hitting our way. But ultimately, what we then also come back to is, is this moment of how do I bring certainty into into my business operations and that’s where sort of these shifts that we are seeing certainly in the mid market to. Rely on the vendors more to get to your point that they’re getting a different level of support that they’re potentially have seen from from vendors in the past as well, right? Sort of. It’s it’s not this. Yes, I commit to a vendor that vendor gives me a software solution and I’m then on my own and I’m stranded and I’m kind of left to to pick up the pieces. As as they sort of materialize through the process, I think what we are seeing now and and JUnit for. Make this huge, huge change in the way that we are thinking about our customers is to kind of really not just talk about customer value and customer life cycles, but to actually mean what we say to kind of be there in the moment when. Prices are changing when an organization is going through rapid growth where there is a real need for a realignment of the existing structures. So we we built a sort of customer support function that is kind of taking essentially really this early. Umm, set up into account where we are kind of, you know, helping customers with industry specific kind of out-of-the-box functionality that is kind of growing over years. And then making it much, much more tailored towards their individual nuances and and therefore also potentially change prices right to kind of get into your point that they’re saying, well, actually. You know, if you look at a Council that you know, they might have had. The main Council estate sort of managed through Unit4, but they are taking on a local school all of a sudden teachers pension will become a huge issue for them to resolve. So we have got those building blocks in place to kind of give them sort of a helping hand as and when needed. To to kind of yeah, try and have a partner and not just the software solution that that then requires a huge amount of reprogramming. I’m thinking, actually Alistair, maybe that’s a good time for us to also reflect a little bit on what extension kit can do in that process, what you reckon?

00:21:32 Alastair Pride

Yeah, I think you’re right. I think you know Dean’s question about market trends, I think extension Kit does fit into that. And what because what it fits into is. How do you do more for less and how do you do things easier? I think extension Kit is is interesting extension kits. One of those terms that we start to use within the within the company we assume people know know what it means and I think is a payroll person. I sit and think what does that mean for me. But so the way I see. The way I see extension Kit is it’s a firstly a tool that moves data, say from one system to another, but it can do other things as well. It can monitor the system and and and flag you when things need. Need attention and other things. So it’s this tool that can do different things. All of those things are designed around. Making the job easier, more efficient, quicker, more reliable. And I think it the other thing about extension kit, which I think is really is really cool, is that it doesn’t rely on. Really expensive IT consultant. So you’ve got this. This kind of flow, this thing going on that if it breaks, you need to get people in. You’re paying money to it. I I’m seeing clients using extension kit themselves, their own in-house IT teams have more than comfortable having the skills themselves to develop it, maintain things. Add on new things if they need to. I think that is all about doing more for less and I. Think that’s you? Know because I’m dealing with customers who are implementing software or developing their software. That’s the big thing that I’m seeing. I work with a lot of not for profits and professional service organizations and everything that they want from their payroll and their and their ERP solution really is. Can it do more for less? And I think extension Kit is one of those. Those tools that does exactly that.

00:23:28 Dylan Teggart

Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a reoccurring theme. I wanted to bring up as well because another growing trend I’ve noticed is that deeper one faster and smarter deployment of payroll, especially among small businesses and medium sized businesses, partly routing back to that. You know the demand of people wanting to be paid on time, but people also wanting to know in real time how much their labor. Because. Made them in return, so they want that access, that easy access and to pay payroll to look in the payroll and with about you know 25% of American workers and similar in the UK in Germany working hourly or part time there’s even more of a demand because there’s all there’s so many more factors involved with paying an hourly worker. 00:23:52 Yeah. And it is just someone on salaries getting paid the same every week. Yeah, yeah. Why do you think this is happening and how do you? How do you feel the? How do you? How is unifour addressing these trends? You mentioned you know in the extension kit and but how do you feel that uniforms addressing this demand for faster and smarter deployment of payroll?

00:24:37 Alastair Pride

Let me let me let Hankey start off on on that this. Actually. Well, let let let me let me kick off just be passing that ball to you because I think it’s it’s a good question Dylan Teggart, I think. Unit4 have addressed it in a really exciting way and the reason that I decided to take it from from my to start with is I’m doing implementations and so for me, if you go back 10 years and look at ERP projects which lasted for six months or two years to get done, customers can’t afford that anymore. That’s not realistic. And that’s not what what customers want. That’s burning through money unnecessarily. So what? Unit4 have done is implemented success outcomes and success outcomes is a way of customers consuming our services. In a way that delivers outcomes really quickly. So you’ve got this fixed outcome. Customers can see that fixed outcome. They can say that that’s what they want and the implementation when it comes to something like me and I’m working with the customers, do it. We know that we’re going to get to that endpoint in the in the defined period of time. The customer’s gonna get what they want. Importantly, it means they are using, let’s say they’re going from scratch to using our software. They’re using the software quickly and I think that’s really key because for me, I think if I’m on a project for three years and the customer’s not using it, particularly if I’m working for like like a charity or something. But I think this is, is this a good use of the money? And I think that’s not what that’s not the world we’re in anymore. We need to get to that outcome quickly and how our success outcomes are really driving that. But then the other thing that I really like about success outcomes is the kind of the building block feel that you’ve got to it where you can you can say implement payroll but it. And you can use it. You can start using it quickly. You’re meeting all of your compliance requirements that you’ve got, but you can then start building and taking new success outcome packages and adding it on to expand your solution to make it more. Either efficient or so widen it out into other areas of the of the business that you’re doing more things for less. I think that’s really excited about success outcomes is something I really like about it. So I I kind of want to pass it to you like and then decided to take it. So you would have you would add to that.

00:26:55 Heike Wiesner

No, I I really love that, Alistair. I think there are a couple of things that went through my mind that that I would like to touch upon. I think the first. Is. To to Dylan Teggart’s point. If we look at the workforce and the composition of the workforce, it is vastly changing, right? I think the the benefit we have got is we don’t have any limitations of which type of, if you like employment contract, we are able to handle whether or not this is a question mark over is it. A volunteer that is sitting sort of on the non for profit side, we are able to kind of bring sort of these specificities into our payer on that are relevant. We can do exactly the same with the consultant. If you were to to think about the not-for-profit side. And I think ultimately. As of workforce evolves, I’ve kind of I’ve said quite a number of years ago. I feel like even in my lifetime and and yes, admittingly I’m I’m getting towards the end of my career but nonetheless. Right in the last 10 years or so, I’m sure I’m still going to get to work from multiple companies at the same time. I think these real transient workforce, these kind of skill related deployment, we are still thinking very much in this homogeneous kind of work environment, right where we say, hey, it’s one company, I’ve got a particular kind of job role. I would like to get paid for that. Role and yes, we can take the norms as into account of that job role in isolation. Like like I was giving that example earlier, but I genuinely believe the level of flexibility needs to increase and the capabilities of the solutions need to increase. And this is a really good sort of situation. If I if I reflect on where you it fall started or say, you know talking about AI and. And streamlining sort of if you like some of the deployment and not just the deployment, but the the day-to-day activities that go in line with payroll? But we are looking to bring a different and increased level of insight into the world of payroll into looking into how can we streamline, if you like the prices but also what does anomaly protect detection look like, right? How can we proactively identify any irregularities that are there in the pay run itself? And make sure that we are actually seeing and detecting these pattern before they actually start to get to to become a problem, if you like or or materialize themselves in an in an error or worse still a payment that we then need to claw back at some point in the future. So I think there’s a real mixture in, in. The depth of what we can bring right from you know, like I said, the the difference in regards to contracts, but more importantly also say how do we help organizations to to identify those patterns to, to stop falling into the same trap over and over again.

00:29:48 Dylan Teggart

Yeah, I feel like that’s a really great, great place to kind of leave it off as we wrap up this podcast. It’s been a. Great conversation with you both and I think. Two things that really stuck with me is. You know, you and you both said these at different times and different ways, but is how? How do you bring certainty into your payroll organization and how do you do more for? As you know, as could payroll seems to be going into the cloud. And it’s letting people pick up the work instead of it being a single source of ownership, it’s now, you know, much easier for a team to do it and seamlessly spread that work out through an organization while attaching it to the general Ledger, you know, and relying on AI. So it’s just making the ease of use for payroll and the barrier for entry for it. A lot. A lot less was I feel like a big take away for for me today. And I want to thank you both for joining me and it’s been a great talk and I just want to ask where can people reach out to you if they have any questions?

00:30:47 Heike Wiesner

Yeah, sure, our website checkoutunit4.com. You’ll find a good overview. We are looking forward to kind of sharing more insight in regards to payroll Navigator. So do stay tuned. We are planning on launching in the autumn. So this is really imminent. But also you can find find me on LinkedIn right. Uh look up like this now and Unit4 and you should should get right to me. So yeah please. Reach out. I’ll be delighted to kind of have a conversation, Alistair.

00:31:15 Alastair Pride

Yeah, same. Same for me. Really. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m happy if anybody wanted to reach out to me and asked to see the uniform payroll and I’ll see what I can do. To to give you a quick glimpse.

00:31:25 Dylan Teggart 

Awesome. Well, thank you both for joining me and thanks everyone for tuning in to this latest 3Sixty Insights #HRTechChat.

 

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