Payroll is caught in a complex web of compliance issues that cannot be overlooked. From a legislative perspective alone, payroll calculations are either impacted or regulated by rules around taxation, superannuation, leave accruals & terminations.
Mastery comes down to optimising people, processes and technology.
Payroll people with Certificate or Diploma qualifications are great. But tangible experience, a mindset for constant improvement and an appetite for technology adoption is ideal. The goal is to hire people who know how to use technology and understand the output.
Payrolls operating with a great number of manual processes and paper forms will never achieve best practice efficiencies. Best practice efficiency comes from automating processes to minimise or eliminate the need for transactional processing by payroll.
Technology is an enabler with the potential to cut costs; however it is not truly effective until it is integrated. It is vital that your payroll system integrates to eliminate duplicate data entry and the manual handling of errors.
Great technology will realise great business value. With data integration between payroll, human resources (HR), finance and time capture systems, organisations are in a unique position to benefit from considerable insight into the people metrics within their business.
These metrics can include visibility of staff costs across departments such as remuneration strategies to ensure retention, analysis of benefit and rewards (ensuring parity across the business) and insights into workforce management strategies. These metrics can, for example, then be juxtaposed with exit data to assess how one company compares to its competitors. The measurement of the number of employees using HR tools and usage frequency will become increasingly important, including as a measure of employee engagement.
By analysing and optimising your technology, processes and people mix, savings will be manifest.
*Copy supplied by Frontier Software
