A recent LinkedIn survey conducted by the InStaff team of 136 payroll professionals showed that approximately 10% of respondents distribute paystubs electronically by email. While emailing paystubs may offer certain advantages over physically printing paper pay statements (e.g., time savings), there are still legitimate drawbacks and concerns to consider about this method of paystub distribution.
Contents
1. Security & Privacy
Email accounts are not an ideal place to hold financial or other sensitive documents due to relatively high risks of unauthorized access. Emails are prime targets for hackers as your email address may be used across many different applications and services or displayed in other ways that make them easy to find publicly. Hacked or lost email accounts can be very difficult to recover.
Also, shared accounts (e.g., between family members) are at increased risk of unauthorized access, and emails accounts are often left open at employees’ desks in the workplace, making it easy for prying eyes to access confidential information.
Risks are particularly high if emailed paystubs and other financial documents are sent without any form of password protection.
2. Possible Compliance Issues
Depending on where you and your employees work, local jurisdiction may not allow for the emailing of paystub information for the security and privacy reasons described. This may be further complicated if your organization operates with employees across different locations and jurisdictions with their own corresponding compliance laws.
3. Lack of Documentation
Emails are not a reliable source of communication history. As paystubs are legally required to be distributed to employees, it is in an organization’s best interest to maintain a secure record of the paystubs that have been delivered to employees. For example, a dedicated paystub portal service may offer the ability for payroll administrators to quickly check any given employees’ paystub history and easily view the statements that reside within their account if required.
4. Technological Barriers
On the employee experience side, it’s important to note that not all employees have email accounts. Your organization still needs to make paystubs available to these employees, and this may result in inefficiencies with your pay statement distribution operation if you are emailing some paystubs and physically printing others. An alternative solution would be to utilize a paystub portal that allows you to deliver employee paystubs electronically, but without the need for an email address for login (i.e., using a username and password combo instead).
5. Inefficiencies in Sending
Depending on your organization’s email setup, payroll administrators may be required to attach paystubs to emails for sending individually (one at a time). This is a relatively tedious and time intensive process that minimizes the advantages of electronic pay statement distribution.
This process can be especially tedious if emailed paystubs are also required to be individually password protected.
6. Unorganized Inboxes
Email inboxes are often flooded with all manners of different emails from different senders, and it can be hard for employees to find specific pay statements or to download all pay statements within a given period without needing to comb through often many thousands of unrelated emails. Compared to a portal service for hosting online paystubs in a secure and centralized location, the experience of trying to retrieve paystubs from an inbox can be tedious and frustrating.
InStaff is a secure (SOC 2 Type 2 certified) employee portal platform trusted by over 200,000+ users for secure paystub delivery, hosting, and employee access. InStaff is compatible with any payroll system and makes it easy to switch your emailed paystubs process to a secure and convenient dedicated portal that offers all the advantages of electronic distribution, with none of the drawbacks and concerns associated with email.
Learn more or request a demo or trial of InStaff for your pay statement distribution needs using the form below:
English