Payroll duties at different organisations may include several intricate activities, such as deducting taxes, health insurance premiums, EPFs, gratuity, and calculating the correct amount of tax payable to relevant government authorities. Additional activities may also include, calculating the tax liability of the company as per federal and individual state laws, calculating eligible deductions, medicare, etc.
Missing a deadline while filing taxes or filing incorrect return details may have legal implications for the organisation involved, making the managing of these tasks efficiently, of utmost importance. Besides the above, the HR department has to ensure that the employees are paid their salaries correctly and timely, also managing multiple media claims and other benefit plans. Furthermore, managing leaves, disabilities etc. also fall under the working domain of the payroll team. Lastly, payroll teams also need to maintain and update the various employee records as per current tax laws.
Managing all these activities around employee payroll manually can be a difficult task, especially for large organisations where HR teams simply cannot process it on excel sheets anymore. Furthermore, manual processing of payroll can also cause the occurrence of human errors, especially when processing full and final settlements or in cases where the employees join in the middle of the financial year. Most growing organisations, at some stage, realise that without the right payroll software the growth of business might not be achievable.
What is Payroll Software?
Payroll software is a tool that makes the processing of payroll for your employees less time consuming and standardized, by restructuring and automating the processes. Apart from improving the general operational effectiveness, Payroll software can compute pay rates including statutory deductions like tax reductions, HRA, ESI, PF and even employee reimbursements. Furthermore, a good payroll software can also manage employee documents, employee attendance, and loans and advances.
Some steps that can help simplify the payroll process for your organisation:
- Centralise your records: Having employee data on different spreadsheets, forms or even registers can be hard to manage, making accessing critical employee data an insufferable task for HR teams that would need to sift through several different sheets to process payroll. Centralising the data can make your payroll process more efficient and easy.
- Sync between Payroll and HR systems: Having two dispersed systems for HR process and payroll call be inefficient and cumbersome. Sync between the two systems will not only cut down on processing times but will also improve the overall efficiency and experience for employees as well.
- Seamless employee experience: By digitising payroll and providing self-service features to your employees, you can save a lot of time for your payroll and HR teams.
- Managing compliance with tech: Compliance management is a critical aspect of payroll. With the frequent changes in compliance norms, it is now imperative that we use technology to simplify and automate processes that can help remain compliant with ease.
- Get in the cloud: Real-time, cloud-based services, can increase productivity, reduce cycle times and help improve overall performance.
Some of the ways in which good Payroll Software can help your business are:
- Save money and time: Small businesses or organisations without payroll software spend a lot of time every month in managing their employee payroll. Further, HR teams spend endless hours over several days or even months on year-end tax preparations. A payroll system can save your organisation a lot of time and money. Freeing up valuable bandwidth of HR and finance teams, so they can spend more time on other critical tasks.
- Provide timely updates: A good payroll software gives you timely updates on things such as tax payables and salary due dates, Other reminders can also be set up depending on your need or requirements.
- Easily managing employee attendance: Time management software with payroll can easily track different aspects of employee status such as sick leaves, overtime, absence. manage different aspects of employee status like check on sick leave, absence and overtime.
- Generating payslips: Payslips are a way for both organisations and employees to keep track of payment records, and payroll software will help you generate these payslips.
- Minimising errors: Errors in calculating things such as taxes can cost your organisation a lot of money! The automation and other computing benefits of payroll software help reduce or minimize errors or mistakes. Further, such systems often update processes to stay in accordance with federal and state regulations.
- Employee self-service: In order to promote a culture of transparency and overall improve employee morale, a good payroll system provides your employees with a portal where they can easily access their pay and benefits records, anytime. Employee information such as critical documents can also be stored online on these portals.
- Customisations as per business needs: Whether you process payroll weekly or monthly, a good payroll software would provide you with the flexibility to customise the process based on your business needs.
- Accounting for multiple salary structures: HRMS tools such as Darwinbox can provide you with comprehensive and accessible modules that make accounting for unique salary frameworks within the organization, easier than ever.
- Customer service: A good payroll software provides you with efficient and timely customer service that can help you with any queries or issues you might be facing.
- Access from Mobile: Modern payroll software like Darwinbox that can integrate with your HRMS can provide your employees with easy access to their payslips and other information on the go, on mobile.
Simplifying your payroll process with an integrated, accurate, scalable and secure payroll management system is key for any organisation. It can simplify complex processes, and even help open up valuable bandwidth for your HR and finance teams, that can be used to focus on other strategic tasks. It will also help your organisation stay on top of compliance and processes and ensure you are processing your payroll in the most accurate and efficient way possible. Finding a solution that easily integrates with your existing systems, or is part of an entire suite will help data flow freely between systems, therefore significantly reducing processing times as well.
