As a PEO, your clients rely on you to simplify the complexities of HR, payroll, and compliance—especially as their teams grow across states and borders. But meeting these expectations isn’t possible with outdated tools or generic HR platforms. To stay competitive and scalable in 2025, you need purpose-built software packed with features tailored to the realities of modern PEO operations.
To meet these demands at scale, your PEO must be powered by HR software that goes beyond the basics. It’s no longer enough to just run payroll or track leave balances. Today’s market leaders are leveraging software that automates, configures, and scales in real-time with their clients’ diverse needs.
Here are the five must-have PEO HR software features that every forward-looking PEO should demand in 2025.
1. Automated Invoicing and Payment Entries Creation
Your HR software should eliminate the repetitive manual work of generating invoices based on each payroll cycle. This includes not just salary but also benefits, reimbursements, service fees, and any applicable markups.
The best implementations of this feature allow PEOs to:
- Auto-generate invoices aligned with predefined payroll schedules.
- Include all relevant elements like taxes, employer contributions, and deductions across multiple state and international juridictions.
- Seamlessly integrate with time-tracking tools and scheduling systems.
- Forecast and schedule upcoming changes in pay, benefits, or taxation months—or even years—in advance.
Why it matters:
It minimizes human error, improving billing accuracy, and reducing disputes with clients. For salaried or consistent contract workers, this automation ensures that monthly invoicing becomes a “set-and-forget” task, freeing up your finance and HR teams for important adhoc and strategic work.
2. Smart Ad Hoc Invoicing
No two clients or employees are alike, and neither are their billing requirements. Whether you’re invoicing for a one-time relocation expense, processing a bonus, or billing out-of-cycle offboarding charges, a professional overseeing this activity is required. However, your HR software should support and augment manual invoicing with smart ad hoc invoicing, to speed completion and reduce errors.
This feature should:
- Allow the creation of one-off invoices on demand, from scratch or duplicating existing invoices.
- Pre-fill typical parameters (e.g., reimbursement limits, commission rates, leave balances) based on client and worker selections.
- Auto-adjust for client, worker or jurisdiction-specific fees and taxes.
- Support approval workflows to maintain billing controls.
Why it matters:
In dynamic work environments—especially with globally distributed teams—ad hoc charges are common. Smart automation in this area saves time and drastically reduces the risk of misbilling, especially in multi-state or multi-country contexts where rates, rules, and thresholds vary even within a single client engagement.
3. Multiple, Concurrent Pay Schedules
In a multi-client PEO environment, pay schedules are rarely uniform. One client may pay weekly, another bi-weekly, and yet another may insist on a monthly schedule based on long-standing internal policies.
Your HR software must be able to:
- Support multiple pay frequencies (weekly, bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly).
- Integrate multiple schedules concurrently across different clients and worker groups.
- Link each pay schedule with its respective invoicing and fee calculation logic.
Why it matters:
This flexibility is essential to serving a broad range of clients without forcing them to conform to a “one-size-fits-all” model. Supporting each client’s preferred schedule reduces friction, increases satisfaction, and ensures your back-office can operate smoothly even as your client base diversifies. Combined with invoicing automation tools, this can unlock new client or markets that have been previously excluded because of back-office time and complexity constraints.
4. Multi-Jurisdictional Configuration
PEOs are expected to be compliance experts. This is where multi-jurisdictional configuration becomes a critical feature in HR software. From U.S. states to international markets, your system should adapt in real-time to the ever-evolving legislative environment.
Top-tier systems will:
- Apply country-, state-, or locality-specific rules for wages, taxes, and benefits.
- Automatically calculate statutory obligations such as paid leave accruals or employer tax contributions.
- Support localized document generation and reporting.
Why it matters:
It drastically lowers the risk of non-compliance and legal exposure. Whether you’re supporting employees in California, Quebec, or Queensland, your system should act like a local expert—automating compliance so you don’t have to chase legislation updates or manually audit every change.
5. Client and Worker-Level Business Model Configuration
Not all clients (or workers) are created equal—and your pricing and workflows should reflect that. Yet many PEOs settle on business models that are uniformly applied, to reduce complexity for their back office and accounting teams. With the right software, you can configure custom rule sets at both the client and worker level to better align with the costs incurred and value your business provides.
Your platform should allow you to:
- Set pricing models per client or worker group (cost-plus, fixed fee, revenue share).
- Customize workflows for high-touch or high-cost workers (e.g., senior executives vs. temp workers).
- Adjust benefit eligibility, markups, and service tiers as needed.
Why it matters:
The ability to tailor how you operate and bill—on a granular level—helps you deliver better service and capture more revenue. High-margin clients or workers with more complex needs shouldn’t be treated the same as entry-level staff. This configurability enables better profitability and better alignment between effort and return.
Final Thoughts
As client expectations rise and the PEO industry becomes more global, the right PEO HR software is not just a support tool—it’s a growth enabler. By adopting a platform with these five features, your PEO will be better equipped to:
- Scale without sacrificing quality,
- Automate intelligently instead of manually managing chaos,
- And ultimately deliver greater value to clients in 2025 and beyond.
If your current system falls short, now is the time to upgrade. Your clients—and your margins—will thank you.
Ready to future-proof your PEO operations?
Discover how our PEO HR software delivers the automation, flexibility, and compliance features you need to scale confidently in 2025 and beyond.
