A lot of businesses still do their payroll processing manually for several reasons. Small and medium enterprises don’t see payroll automation – and the presence of a good payroll system – as a worthy investment to make due to their scale and the relatively small number of employees they have. Bigger businesses, on the other hand, rely on existing HR processes, which often don’t include automated payroll management.
In reality, automating the payroll brings a lot of valuable benefits to the table. To help you understand the need for payroll automation and how your business can benefit from it, we are going to take a look at three most compelling reasons to start automatic your payroll early. Let’s get started, shall we?
It’s Easier Than You Think
Choosing and implementing the right payroll system used to be one of the biggest barriers to automating payroll, but this isn’t a problem now that there are so many cloud-based and SaaS solutions on the market. You can do so much more than automatically process your payroll with the right system in place.
Cloud-based solutions allow you to take advantage of a comprehensive payroll system – or an HR management suite with more tools – without a big initial investment to worry about. You pay a fixed monthly fee and can start using the solution in minutes. Integrating a good payroll system to existing workflows is just as easy.
You don’t even need to change any hardware within the business. Since the best solutions today are designed to run in the cloud, you can access the payroll or HR management system using any standard browser and from any remote terminal; being able to manage your human resources when on a business trip or from your favourite coffee shop is a huge plus.
You Save a Lot of Time
Manual payroll processing is very labour- and time- intensive. You spend a lot of time and resources recapping various details and calculating amounts to distribute to employees. It doesn’t stop there either. You also need to synchronize the manual payroll recap with accounting; of course, you have to input each transfer manually as well.
An automated payroll system will handle all of these tasks for you. The system tracks employee attendance and other metrics as needed. You can actually see how employees perform in real-time based on inputs from various sources. At the end of the month, the system will do the calculations automatically, with no human input needed beyond corrections or adjustments.
Integrate the payroll system with a Bacs payment service such as AccessPay, and you can streamline the entire payroll process from start to finish. The payroll system can produce the necessary Bacs payment file and deliver it directly. At this point, employees will receive their salaries on time and without errors.
You Get a Lot of Insights
From the previous reasons, it is easy to see how a good payroll automation system can help improve your HR management workflow. For starters, payroll will always be in sync with accounting or finance thanks to automatic report generation and easy integration with other solutions such as ERP or accounting systems.
You can also monitor employee performance in real-time depending on how you set up the payroll system. Tracking attendance, monitoring paid leave, organizing employee travels (for business purposes), and assigning tasks can be done in a more meticulous and organized way with the data you now have.
Automation also means you can redirect your HR resources towards other more important tasks, such a recruiting new team members, developing existing employees, and maintaining a healthy work environment. With HR executives no longer tied to manual payroll recap, it is easy to invest more in employee training and other programs.
The cost savings are just as good. You are looking at fewer errors and more accurate payroll calculations with an automated system in place. You don’t need to maintain such a large HR department as before too, giving you the option to downsize and stay lean if that’s the strategy you want to implement.
Automated payroll is suitable for businesses of different sizes. When you have more than five workers or if you’re dealing with hourly workers on a regular basis, there are many ways you can benefit from automating your payroll system
Founder Dinis Guarda
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