When thinking about improving your business, you may not think of payroll, but that’s a mistake. Improving your payroll management process can give you more control over money flow in and out of your company. It also gives you more control over the time spent on payroll processing. You can allocate that time and those resources to other tasks that are more effective. Here are six tips to improve your payroll management process.
1. Automate Your System
Automation of your payroll system can help you not only gain more control over your payroll process but can also save time. When you fully automate your payroll system, you’ll spend less time entering data manually. You can allocate that time more effectively to other, more important tasks.
Workers who use automation to track their hours usually know how much they’re working each week and where they spend their time.
2. Integrate Payroll with Attendance and Time Software
With a fully integrated payroll and time tracking system, you can link payroll processing to the hours employees are logging. If you use a biometric timeclock software for your employees, your time software can pull in data from the device and add that to the payroll system. When an employee punches out at the end of their shift, the time clock will send their attendance data to the payroll software. The software will know that they’ve punched out and record that they’ve worked a certain number of hours. When you run payroll, your time clock software will pull in the hours worked and adjust any necessary overtime.
3. Improve User Experience
Make your employees happy by making it easier for them to do their jobs. If your employees spend more time punching out at the end of their shift and entering their earnings, you’re doing something wrong from a payroll management process standpoint. When they punch out, they want the system to be simple and easy to use. They don’t want to stand idly in front of a computer screen for an hour or two. Make sure that the user experience is good when an employee punches out.
4. Improve Accuracy
One of the best ways to improve accuracy is to automate your payroll system fully. When a lot of data is entered manually, it will often have errors. That’s why many people in corporations use programs that automatically fill in the blanks for them and log the data for them. After all, if you’re manually entering data into a system, you could easily make mistakes that will cost you time and money.
5. Accessibility of the System 24/7
If you need to run payroll from the office, you want the system to be accessible at all times. If an employee needs to enter their hours, they should be able to do so from any computer with internet access. That way, they don’t have to wait for you or an IT person. It will also let them log their hours during non-work hours if necessary.
They might not enter their hours if they don’t have access to the system during non-work hours. That will mean that you’ll have to run payroll by hand. If you do it manually, you’ll probably make mistakes because there’s no way that you can enter every piece of data perfectly by hand.
If employees have easy and instant access to the system, they’re more likely to use it and enter their hours accurately. And that means you’re less likely to have errors when you run payroll.
6. Update Your System Regularly
Payroll management systems are constantly changing. The IRS, for example, will often change the requirements for calculating overtime pay and entering that information into your payroll system. Make sure that you’re always up-to-date on the latest regulations and requirements. You can do that by reading manuals, talking to industry experts, or finding a payroll management system that can help you log the data in a way that notices and understands industry changes quickly.
Conclusion
Employee payroll management is a very important part of running a successful business. If you don’t control your employees’ money flow, you’re losing out on money that could go to other company areas. You’ll also be faced with constant employee complaints about how much time they have to spend doing payroll-related tasks. Invest some time into improving your payroll management process, and you’ll be able to increase your control and have happier employees.