How to Deliver Payslips and Payroll Documents to Employees

Payroll documents are recurring records

A payslip is not just a document an employee needs once.

Month after month, employees build up a history of payroll records that they may need for:

• mortgage or rental applications
• tax questions
• checking pay
• resolving payroll queries
• proving income
• personal record-keeping
• future employment or financial applications

That means payroll document delivery is not only about sending this month’s payslip.

It is also about helping employees find older payroll documents when they need them.

The problem with sending payslips by email

Email is simple, but recurring payroll documents quickly become difficult to manage.

An employee may receive twelve payslips a year, plus annual tax documents, bonus statements, commission statements or other payroll records.

Over several years, those documents can become scattered across many email threads.

They may be:

• buried in an inbox
• downloaded to different devices
• saved under unclear filenames
• deleted by mistake
• sent to an email address the employee later stops using
• difficult to locate when urgently needed

For confidential payroll information, ordinary email can also be a poor long-term document home.

Payroll portals solve part of the problem

Many payroll and HR systems provide employee portals.

These can work well while the employee remains with the [[organization|organisation]].

The employee signs in to view current and historic payslips, tax documents and other records.

The difficulty often appears when the employee leaves.

Access to the employer’s payroll or HR systems may need to end, while the former employee may still need their historic documents.

That creates the same distinction as other forms of offboarding:

system access can end while document access still matters.

A better recurring payroll process

A good payroll document process should:

• deliver each document securely
• make each document easy to identify
• build a clear history over time
• allow employees to find previous documents easily
• work without relying on old email threads
• support access after employment ends where appropriate

The process should work just as well for the 36th payslip as it did for the first.

Documents that can form part of the payroll record

Depending on the employer and payroll process, recurring documents may include:

• monthly or weekly payslips
• annual tax documents
• bonus statements
• commission statements
• pension contribution information
• benefits statements
• payroll adjustment notices
• leaving documents

These documents naturally belong together as part of the employee’s personal employment record.

When the employee leaves

Payroll is especially strong as a document-delivery use case because the recurring and offboarding problems meet.

During employment, the employee receives documents regularly.

When employment ends, the employer may remove access to payroll and HR systems.

But the employee may still need documents from months or years earlier.

A better model is to deliver payroll documents into a place the employee controls, rather than making long-term access depend entirely on an active employer account.

For more on this, see How to Give Former Employees Access to Documents After They Leave.

Where Documentd fits

Documentd helps employers and payroll providers deliver important documents into the employee’s own document home.

Each payslip or payroll document can become part of an accumulating record that remains easy for the employee to find.

The employer gets a repeatable delivery process.

The employee gets a clearer long-term home for important payroll documents.

And when the employment relationship ends, the employee’s documents do not have to disappear with access to the employer’s systems.