No matter what your company's size or the nature of your business, payroll is always a primary concern. Ensuring that your workforce is paid accurately and on time is an essential part of running a successful organization, but it is in these payroll processes that the largest business losses are often realized from the smallest of mistakes. Eliminating mistakes and increasing proficiency is a priority, but adherence to a traditional payroll model may make this task much harder than it sounds. One quick and ready solution to this hurdle is to rely on online payroll solutions to augment your payroll department and take aim at errors and inefficiencies.
What Are Online Payroll Solutions?
Online payroll is an alternative to the traditional time card and timesheet method of recordkeeping, integrating an online reporting system with cloud-based recordkeeping. This streamlines the payroll recording system considerably, often reducing it to a three-step approval and filing process. With less human intervention in the system, the chances of human error are mitigated accordingly, but this is not the only benefit of converting a traditional payroll department to an online system.
Increasing Accountability
One of the most difficult parts of an organization with so many moving parts and steps for document flow is that it is often difficult to isolate exactly where inefficiencies and errors exist, as small errors are often compounded into larger ones down the line. An online system keeps a real-time record of all alterations to payroll data making it much easier to take steps to remedy payroll discrepancies.
Ensuring Compliance
Tracking employee compliance with payroll policies and best practices can often be difficult in a self-contained payroll system, but online reporting can prohibit unauthorized alterations to payroll documents such as inconsistent information in time/attendance or pay rate. Generating comprehensive reports detailing this information is often s a daunting task that can take several days in a traditional payroll department but can be viewed on a single screen in an online system.
Simplify Reporting
Employee time cards may not reflect the way that your employees are currently compensated. Very few organizations these days compensate their employees purely with hourly wages. Employee payroll problems are less likely to be compensation-based and have a higher incidence of discrepancies in earned benefits such as paid vacation, flex time, and sick leave. You may have employees who need to report gratuities for tax purposes or have commissions paid on the basis of their performance, timesheets are becoming ever more complex and employees increasingly prone to error. Online reporting simplifies timesheets into one simple online form that can help employees to accurately calculate and report both benefits earned and keep track of those which have been expended.
Determine the Cost/Benefit
Instituting an online payroll system will have an up-front cost that might make you think twice about making the change, but the cost to benefit ratio must be taken into account. Online reporting reduces the human resource of your workforce required to repetitively approve and file payroll documents, permitting them more time to review and audit the payroll system to find persistent errors. Catching these clerical errors before they are discovered on employee pay stubs or by a tax audit can realize immense savings both in financial terms and employee relations. Money may be what shows on the bottom line, but the real measure of success in business is how dedicated your workforce is to the success of your company. When your workforce can trust that their compensation and benefits will be accurate on every pay statement it will go a long way toward advancing that mutual goal.
