How do payroll integrations work

If I had a pound for every time I’d been asked this question…

Ok, let’s talk payroll.

Stating the obvious first – there is no payroll functionality included in Talent, and if there ever is, I will eat not just my hat, but my laptop, monitor, and headset – with the mouse for afters.

If you run payroll in house, and you decide to keep your payroll solution within the Dynamics ecosystem, you’ve got a couple of options:

• There is a payroll module as standard within Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, which is written for the US and RU markets. Evaluate it carefully if considering it. As it’s not HMRC compliant, it’s not an option in the UK.
• There are 3rd party ISV solutions which can handle UK payroll. The one I’ve worked with most often operates as an additional module in FinOps. To all intents and purposes you wouldn’t know it wasn’t part of the standard product. Check out AppSource for referrals.

If you’re less wedded to the idea of running payroll within Dynamics, and you need to integrate with an external payroll solution (either outsourced or in-house), you’ve got 3 options:

• Use the standard, out of the box payroll integration (which at the time of writing works only with Ceridian Dayforce in the US and the UK, and is described here). It’s likely that further out of the box integrations will be added in time, but I’d advise against setting any critical project milestones around this.
• Use a 3rd party ISV solution which can help you construct your payroll interface – again check out AppSource
• Build your own payroll integration using CDS as a data source (or, if the data you need – like variable compensation – isn’t yet in CDS, using the workaround of a standalone SQL database populated via the BYODB features in the data management workspace).

If all this talk of SQL, ISVs, CDS and BYODB is bringing you out in a cold sweat, check out one of the Microsoft partners who can help you out with it.