For HR Pros: How to Get Payroll On Board with Earned Wage Access

In conversations I’ve had with HR leaders, I’ve encountered a common theme. Many (if not most) of them are familiar with earned wage access and understand the value it could bring to to their employees. But they’re still navigating a tricky part of the equation: championing it internally to the payroll team.

Payroll pushback is one of the biggest reasons EWA initiatives stall before they reach implementation. And it’s not because payroll teams just like to gripe, but rather because a lot of EWA vendors genuinely do create a lot of disruption. And in payroll, there’s not often time for self-inflicted disruption.

This back-and-forth is a common moment. So let’s write an entire blog about it!

What payroll is worried about

Payroll teams tend to have specific, well-founded concerns about EWA. They’re generally centered around one worry – what will this do to my process?

The first flag I hear payroll raise is manual work. Legacy EWA models required payroll to import a file and manually apply deductions every single pay cycle, the kind of rote task a pay rep isn’t exactly excited about adding to their plate.

The second flag? A loss of control. If a vendor is intercepting direct deposit or requiring employees to open a new bank account, payroll is handing off part of their own process to a third party they now have to trust implicitly. It also requires work for the employees that might use the benefit, the ones who have to switch accounts or change banks.

And undergirding both of those is a simpler fear: if something goes wrong, whether that's a missed paycheck, a reconciliation error, or an employee confused about a deduction, payroll is the one who hears about it first. They’re the ones firing up the laptop at 9pm on a Friday night when they’d much rather be enjoying Netflix and a glass of wine.

These are all reasonable stressors. Let’s help HR leaders allay each of those concerns below.

Addressing concerns from payroll

We talked about legacy EWA models that caused manual file uploads to reconcile or forced employees to swap banks or bank accounts. But there’s a new model that’s emerged recently that combined the best components of each legacy provider into a modern way to run EWA.

It’s called payroll-native, and it was built specifically to reduce the stressors about EWA that keep many payroll pros from saying yes.

On manual work: there isn't any. A payroll-native EWA integrates with the payroll and timekeeping systems already in place, and deductions reconcile automatically on every run. There’s no file to import and no spreadsheet to maintain.

On control: direct deposit is never touched. An employee's earned wage access shows up as a line-item deduction on their pay stub, the same way a 401(k) contribution does. Payroll isn't handing off any part of the disbursement process to a vendor.

On risk: if a deduction can't be recovered, that's absorbed by the provider, not by payroll or the company. A payroll team shouldn’t need to cover a shortfall that was never theirs to begin with.

A script for the conversation between HR and Payroll

Here’s a cheat sheet for when the conversation with payroll kicks off and how to champion the benefit.

If payroll is still skeptical

Sometimes the concern isn't any single objection, but a general wariness about earned wage access in general. This can be a tougher concern to overcome, candidly. All you can do as an HR leader is lead with the evidence. More than a third of working Americans said that living paycheck-to-paycheck would be an improvement upon their financial lives. Point blank: people are struggling.

But earned wage access has been proven to help. 88% of Tapcheck users surveyed said they used earned wage access primarily for emergencies. 70% said it helped them avoid overdrafting an account.

It’s not meant to be a cure-all for money woes or a substitute for proper budgeting. But the reality is, when a working mother needs to feed her children she will find a way to get the money. Her employer could offer her a safer alternative.

When they’re ready to evaluate providers and get into the mechanics of a transfer, we’re ready to chat.