Revolutionise Your Payroll With These 5 Simple Steps

One Critical HR Function That Is Common To Each And Every Organisation Is Payroll.

And payroll is not just a process that needs to be taken care of at the last week of every month. The benefits of a smooth and error free payroll process can potentially convert into creating a culture of happier and more productive employees among many other benefits. This is why payroll should be an easy task to carry out. Unfortunately, payroll continues to be a hassle for most HR managers across organisations. Many enterprises are still going the manual route, getting stuck with documents and attendance sheets at the end of each month. All these outdated processes take away a lot of time and create a stressful time for those taking care of payroll.

“Statistics show that roughly 40 percent of small businesses incur an average of $845 a year in IRS penalties.”

This needs to change. It is best for enterprises to adopt the latest payroll software and ensure that their HR and finance team spend their time doing constructive work as they are supposed to. Here are a few ways in which you can avoid unnecessary payroll induced frustration for employers as well as employees, and create more fulfilling experiences for all stakeholders involved.

1. Shift Focus Towards Core Activities

Timely and error-free disbursement of payroll can have many more benefits than one can imagine. Moving away from manual operations of payroll can help recover countless hours that get wasted on documentation and administrative tasks for each employee. Automating a payroll system can help eliminate frustration and headache as it is quick, systematic, intelligent and convenient. The number of hours spent on unnecessary tasks will drop down immensely and HR no longer would need to run to finance every time an issue crops up. An effective payroll system takes just a couple of clicks once set up and can be handed over completely to the finance department, with no dependence on IT. Take the stress out of paydays and focus more on how to cut costs, minimize risks and created more engaged workplace cultures.

2. Manage Employee Time Better

Imagine the mental plight of an HR manager sifting through a mountain of papers which have manual records of attendance and time tracking of employees. Not an good image, right? Such a system is anything but efficient and can lower the morale of not just the payroll team, but also the employees. No one wants to be told to sign in registers twice everyday or be ridiculed for forgetting to mark the same. This can be done away with by opting for an HR software that lets you capture entry and exit time of employees without any effort on anyone’s part. The software should be such that the attendance data captured can be easily integrated into payroll for smoother operations. This will enable your business to record timings as well as link it to a streamlined payroll process. Additional benefits include better time management, employees managing their schedules better and real time tracking of presence.

3. Automate Filing Of Taxes

Payroll gets even more complex as it needs to incorporate statutory and legal compliances before getting rolled out. Filing taxes which adhere to all the norms is a tedious process which digs into a lot of valuable time and resources of employers, with a high scope for being incorrect or faulty with critical calculations. Such errors can cost companies heavily. This is why automating tax filling makes so much sense. It saves employers from collecting documents from their staff every once in a while and also stay compliant with the respective state and federal regulations. A cloud based payroll software can also help employers stay up to date with latest information regarding laws which payroll processes need to incorporate within them.

4. Change The Way Leave Is Managed

Manual keeping up with each and every employee’s leave can be a nightmare! But it needs to be done since vacation accrual and absence tracking is an invincible part of determining payroll. Going through emails to check who is on leave when or other kinds of records which are the easiest to get lost can drive anyone crazy. A payroll software can help you with a common platform where employees apply for leave as well as can see the schedule of their team members and take decisions accordingly. The supervisors or managers can also see this list and approve/reject as per what the organisation demands at that point. This can be integrated into attendance and subsequently to payroll, thus making all headache associated with manual calculations of accrual vanish!

5. Let Your Employees Take Charge

From the time the employee joins to the time of exit, there are a lot of documentation processes that need to happen in any organisation. Instead of manually going about collecting individual documents, a good idea could be to ask employees themselves to upload the same in a holistic payroll software that enables them to create their own profiles where all of it can be stored. The same documents can be accessed at anytime if a need arises, and a note can also be put down if anything additional is required. Such a system also reduces the chance of losing hard copies by always keeping it safe in cloud under one single roof. The employee also has access to all of his own documents and the profile can be a go to place for him to see his payroll details, documents and attendance sheet, so that transparency is ensured.