An effective payroll department isn’t just essential to a business’s functioning. It also plays a significant role in maintaining a high level of employee satisfaction. Employees depend on getting paid promptly and consistently with the correct amount stated in their contracts.
A payroll process that’s slow, prone to errors, or too complicated can result in a strained relationship between an employer and employees and unnecessarily take out of the time of the HR team.
In the early stages of a company’s life, payroll might operate a manual process that works fine for a handful of employees. But as employee size grows, the manual recording, tracking, and reporting time and attendance methods can become overwhelming.
As a result, businesses become open to risks such as late payroll remittances, which make them liable to government penalties. It gets worse. After just two errors, employees who monitor their paychecks carefully will start seeking new job opportunities.
Luckily, there are a number of changes you can make to improve efficiency in your payroll department. Here are nine payroll tips to optimise efficiency in your payroll department:
How to Manage an Effective Payroll Department
Payroll Tips #1 – Have a Standardized and Streamlined Payroll System
Having an excellent payroll software package can be problematic if it doesn’t work with your company’s payroll system.
And having multiple systems for inputting, capturing, tracking, and processing employee remunerations can create many problems with steps where mistakes are often made or data is lost.
Simplifying, consolidating, or streamlining your existing systems to contain a list of all the employees in your company who receive remuneration for work carried out or services offered to the company is an efficient means for improving your overall payroll management process.
Reviewing all the steps involved and taking time to analyze the process from a high-level perspective can help you and your team finds ways to optimize your payroll system.
Payroll Tips #2 – Ensure Payroll is Integrated with other Business Functions
An excellent way to ensure your payroll is as streamlined as possible is to integrate your payroll with other essential business functions such as accounting and HR.
Integration helps to avoid duplication of work and provides maximum efficiency.
HR and Payroll; Information on new starters, changes to employee information, and absences can be transferred between HR and the payroll department using the payroll systems to ensure both teams use the exact and most up-to-date information.
Ensure you put processes in place to know how the flow of information will work for your business. For example, will information go from HR to payroll or vice versa?
Finance and Payroll; Payroll and accounting departments should work closely together to report payroll costs accurately. This will ensure the accuracy of the payroll figures for your finance team.
Payroll Tips #3 – Update Payroll Software
Suppose you are still conducting payroll manually, or you’re still using outdated payroll software. In that case, you might need to start thinking of upgrading your software.
This is one of the more common causes of inefficiencies in the payroll department. In addition, not updating your payroll software means you miss out on changes to employment rules.
Good payroll management software is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to improve payroll in your company. It can turn manual data entry and processing hours into minutes simply by taking on automation and connection across platforms.
Holding on to manually conducting payroll or an old form of software may save your business money. However, this will have costly implications later down the line.
When you team up with experts, you can access software solutions that you need to make your payroll run smoothly.
Payroll Tips #4 – Stay up-to-date on the Latest Employment Laws
It’s crucial to stay up-to-date on changes made to employment laws at a federal, state, and local level because being guilty of non-compliance can cause severe legal and reputational damage.
Businesses must stay updated on the myriad of government agency compliance rules and regulations. The potential penalty cost for companies that fail to meet deadlines or miss filing certain forms can be catastrophic, especially to smaller businesses.
Payroll Tips #5 – Establish a Payroll Calendar
Creating a payroll calendar that lists; pay periods, payroll duration, and other aspects of the payroll cycle is essential if your business carries out payroll in-house.
You may also want to outline what input is required for payroll processing, including; when payroll will be completed and the due dates for all tax deposits.
This will allow everyone in the department to be on the same page when it comes to processing payroll, and it will let everyone see what needs to be done for payroll.
Payroll Tips #6 – Have a Backup
Losing payroll data creates all kinds of difficulties for an organisation. For one, it delays the issuance of paychecks to employees. In addition, losing sensitive data can make legal liabilities.
So, it is imperative to have a personnel backup. This is especially crucial for small companies where one person shoulders most of the payroll responsibility.
Payroll Tips #7 – Outsource Your Payroll Process
Outsourcing to a payroll service provider is one of the foremost and most prominent trends in payroll management in business.
This is a significant trend among large and small companies as many realise that their cost savings far outweigh the investment.
If you’re a small business owner and do not have the resources to build a new payroll system or update an older one, outsourcing to a professional, full-service payroll management company can be a strategic and cost-effective option.
According to studies released by the staffing services firm Robert Half and Financial Executives Research Foundation, the research affiliate of Financial Executives International, 47% of U.S. companies reported outsourcing payroll.
Payroll Tips #8 – Perform Regular Audits
Are your employees having frequent complaints about payroll? Then, this is a pointer that something isn’t working well.
Ongoing concerns and payroll mistakes are signs that you should be conducting regular audits of the entire payroll process.
A thorough workflow analysis is the best way to isolate and identify a potential payroll issue. As you analyze every step of the process from beginning to end, it becomes much easier to see where problems originate.
You can then take steps to change the story and improve payroll processing for your business.
Payroll Tips #9 – Hire Qualified Staff
A company’s people are all that matters at the end of the day. A qualified staff makes all the difference. If staff are well trained and equipped to handle payments, they’ll do well.
So, team members hired must be qualified. Regular re-training of employees will also help staff members correctly understand how payroll works. So, if you have good staff at hand, you’d rarely have issues arise.
The payroll department’s job requires that you facilitate various tasks and processes. Because of ever-changing regulations, rules, and legislation, you must constantly stay apprised of the compliance aspect of your job.
In addition, changes in technology, your company structure, and best practices require that you remain agile and ready to adapt accordingly.