Smarten up Your Payroll Handling

Smarten up your Payroll handling

Table of Contents

Payroll Efficiency 3

Team effort 3

Business Owner / General Manager 3

Financial Controller / Pay Officer 3

Every Manager 3

11 Strategies 4

1. Educating staff 4

2. Business intelligence dashboards 5

For management 5

For the pay officer 5

3. Reducing the reliance on paper 7

4. Improving payroll processing 8

7. Faster payroll processing 11

8. Country-specific features 12

South Pacific (including Papua New Guinea) specific features 12

9. Importance of local payroll systems 13

10. HR, OH&S, time clocks, rosters, kiosks and more 14

11. Reducing the risk of fraud 15

Payroll Efficiency

Team effort

A team effort is essential. Everyone needs to have trust in your payroll systems and they need to embrace the concept that improved productivity is all about working smarter not harder.

Business Owner / General Manager

You motivate staff and monitor progress towards your goals (for example, revenue per employee to grow 10% in the next six months).

Financial Controller / Pay Officer

As the payroll administrators, you must ensure your payroll systems are set up in the most efficient way possible.

Every Manager

You must ensure staff understand their pay advice, follow payroll procedures and proactively look for ways to improve productivity.

11 Strategies

We will look at 11 strategies to help you improve your payroll efficiency. Each strategy is comprised of specific tactics.

1. Educating staff

The better educated your staff, the more value they will get out of using the payroll.

Part of the staff induction process should be to explain the payroll administration function with samples to support your discussion.

When things such as superannuation and tax rates change, hold a staff meeting to explain how the changes will appear on pay advices.

Ensure all staff use the procedures you introduce to run an efficient payroll system. You might like to discuss them under the headings used in this guide.

2. Business intelligence dashboards

Business intelligence dashboards are an exciting new tool that provides a clear view of what is happening in your business.

For management

Dashboards provide a top-down view of your payroll so you can keep a close eye on what is one of your biggest expense items and business assets.

Each payroll dashboard can have up to five on-screen reports (called gadgets) making them easier to review than paper-based reports and spread sheets.

To ensure security, access rights govern what is displayed and to whom.

Dashboards provide an overview of all employees, displaying such things as all leave taken and current leave liability.

You can monitor real-time payroll data without having to navigate through menus or ask other staff for help.

For the pay officer

You can get a Payroll, Human Resource (HR) and Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) system rolled into one.

As an illustration, Attaché Payroll comes with five standard payroll dashboards, with the ability to select gadgets on each dashboard from a standard library or to customise your own.

Payroll home: To Do List, negative leave, anniversaries.
Employee details: personal details, full pay and contact history.
Leave analysis: complete leave history including entitlements, leave taken and upcoming.
Exception reports: active pay totals and pay details. Most importantly, exception messages alert you to potential issues prior to processing the pays.
My reports: a library of gadgets to display in your own dashboard.

The dashboards provide visual management so you can see at a glance what needs to be done without having to be told or run reports.

You can drill down from the dashboards into an employee’s masterfile and pay details without having to navigate menus.

You can perform Google-like searches on part of an employee name, code or even a phone number for fast access to employee files.

The To Do List has calendar reminders for both regular events and follow-up situations. It is continuously displayed and automatically updated.

You can view gadgets as lists, calendars and graphs and add totals and search boxes to suit your needs.

You can select data sequences and filters, for example, all employees with more than 20 days leave owing.

Details can be emailed to others without printing reports, posting or using couriers.

You can add and monitor all correspondence with staff, such as workers compensation claims, disciplinary warnings, etc.

You can create any number of contact types for quick referencing and reporting.

You can create tasks and follow up tasks, attaching files where necessary. Outstanding tasks can be highlighted.

You can keep track of all employee contact details such as pay reviews and increases.

3. Reducing the reliance on paper

Reliance on paper-based payroll systems can reduce efficiency, increase costs and raise security issues, and it is not good for the environment.

Using drill down to retrieve payroll information is faster and more efficient than any paper-based systems.

There is less need for storage cabinets and office space to archive historical documents.

You can scan employee documents, such as employment agreements, and easily access them.

Use ExpressLink to electronically file and send payroll reports.

Access rights make electronic filing more secure and documents are not left on desks, misfiled, etc.

Electronic filing saves clerical time. For example, most employee enquiries can be handled instantly.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and New Zealand Inland Revenue Department (NZIRD) accept electronic records provided the system is secure with controls over processing and backups. Pay records must be kept for seven years and be able to be retrieved by tax officers at any time.

4. Improving payroll processing

On-screen payroll dashboards provide the single greatest benefit, and Attaché Payroll includes five (see strategy 2). Other tactics for improving payroll processing include:

Use Shortcuts for faster access to regularly-used functions and reports.

Each operator can select their own screen colours and font sizes and can automatically resize windows and report preview screens to suit their personal requirements.

Multi-tasking lets operators have multiple tasks open at the same time for faster processing (for example, while entering a timesheet you can modify an employee’s details) and handle typical accounts interruptions (such as a customer enquiry about an invoice).

Create different company backgrounds to easily identify which company you are working in.

Ensure your data is secure by using menu access rights to restrict operators’ access to payroll functions.

Use employee groups to easily maintain employees who have the same pay details. By attaching employees to a group, pay rate changes need only be entered once to update the entire group.

Use standard messages for fast data entry when adding notes or comments to employee pays.

Design your own pay advices to include company-specific details.

Quick and easy archiving of data ensures an up-to-date copy of the payroll is secure before any major processing or changes are made.

Unlimited number of income types, such as ordinary hours, overtime, sick leave, etc.

Unlimited number of allowances and deductions using different calculation methods such as percentage of pay, fixed or variable values, quantity by value, etc.

Employees can have multiple bank accounts.

Open bank accounts, such as for the social club, can be used by all employees.

Manage payment schedules by start and stop dates, total amount, number of instalments and frequency to automatically control deductions and allowances in an employee’s pay. For example:

· Higher duties allowance paid for a period of time.

· Payments to a nominated bank account for garnishee or loan repayments.

Use cost centres to split an employee’s wages over multiple divisions.

General ledger postings reports list all the financial transactions generated for the pay run. These transactions can be automatically interfaced to Attaché Accounts or the report can provide the basis of a journal to be entered or exported to other systems.

Use multiple pay locations and pay points to easily group employees for maintenance and reporting.

Use the 18 user-definable fields to capture company-specific information such as pay classifications, driver’s licence numbers, etc.

Multiple employment status for wage expense analysis, for example full time, part time, casual, contract, etc.

Multiple pay frequencies, for example monthly, weekly, bi-monthly, fortnightly.

Add employee notes, such as additional personal or medical details, against each employee.

The URL link enables documents such as employment agreements, licences, leave applications and sickness certificates to be stored for fast and immediate access.

Leave monitoring

This is also a major benefit of the payroll business intelligence dashboards (see strategy 2).

Unlimited leave tables for annual, sick, personal, long service and other leave.

Multiple leave calculation methods, for example you can calculate leave by hours worked, date or pay.

Record and report the start and finish dates of leave taken.

Create leave liability journals each pay run, and check that these values remain reasonable.

Superannuation

Superannuation calculations, exporting and reporting is available

Set up any number of employee superannuation contributions.

Set up any number of superannuation funds.

Remember that you can export a NASFund file that can be emailed or uploaded by NASFund.

Payroll safety checks

Set a maximum pay per employee for each pay frequency so you can be alerted if there is an unexpected increase in gross pay.

Check the payroll payments report against the net wages on the payroll totals report and against the actual payments drawn from the bank account.

Integrate the payroll to the general ledger after each pay run to easily check for budget variances in the wages accounts.

Track changes for all additions and modifications to employee master files and payroll transactions.

Use auto tax calculations during timesheet entry to ensure the correct amount of tax is withheld for each employee.

Turn on confirm new master files to prevent operators from accidentally adding unwanted or invalid master files.

Select to display annual leave warning messages for leave that goes into negative before it is paid.

7. Faster payroll processing

Reduce data-entry time and errors by creating standard pays for employees whose pay details don’t change from pay period to pay period.

Set each employee to auto pay so you only need to key in changes from their standard pay, such overtime or sick leave.

Automatically decrease normal (ordinary) hours worked when entering leave hours for employees.

Instantly check leave entitlements during timesheet entry.

Enter one-off pay rate changes and bonuses during timesheet entry.

Add comments to pay transactions that will print on the pay advice.

For faster reconciliation, choose to display on screen the total hours worked or the total hours paid.

Open the calendar on any date field to select the correct dates.

Open the calculator on any amount field to do quick calculations.

Enter the start/stop times for the hours worked by an employee.

Enter the first/last dates for leave taken by an employee.

Display optional warnings for exceeded leave hours and for base hours that are not reached or are exceeded.

Enter adjustment pays, for example updating opening balances for employees when first implementing the payroll, pay reversals, etc.

Check and uncheck the pays to enter changes as many times as necessary before updating the files.

8. Country-specific features

It means you only need one payroll if you process, for example, payrolls for both your Australian and Papua New Guinea offices from the one location.

Select the country for the payroll you are processing to activate the appropriate tax rates and other country-specific features and requirements.

South Pacific Software Services, in conjunction with our Sydney office, handle the South Pacific and Papua New Guinea. (www.spss.net.au/wiki)

South Pacific (including Papua New Guinea) specific features

This covers several countries so please refer to South Pacific Software Services. (www.spss.net.au)

Some examples for Papua New Guinea include: NAS Fund Contribution Schedule, Loan and Savings Schedule, Statement of Earnings.

9. Importance of local payroll systems

Your systems are only as good as the support you can get and the supplier’s commitment to local on-going enhancements.

Financial software must meet the practices and legal requirements of the country in which it is being used. These can change at short notice so the software developer’s investment in local support must be substantial.

Payroll software demands an even greater degree of local support. This is why so many businesses using international financial software use a local standalone payroll system.

10. HR, OH&S, time clocks, rosters, kiosks and more

Intelligent business systems provide a powerful payroll engine with the ability to integrate with specialist systems should the size and nature of your payroll require them.

If you endeavour to get all of these systems from the one payroll software vendor, typically something is likely to be compromised.

The Attaché Payroll dashboards can provide a number of Human Resource (HR) and Occupational Health & Safety features, for example:

Record, categorise and report on incidents.
Record and be reminded of pay review dates.
Record and be reminded of training information.
Be reminded of licence/qualification expiry.
Record and review leave by employee and across the company.

Rostering is an area where the payroll savings can be large. RosterLive provide rostering, award interpretation and time and attendance (T&A) systems (www.rosterlive.com.au). They provide these examples:

The main areas of payroll savings come from:

Reducing payroll administration, human error and time theft.
Eliminating manual timesheets and leave applications.
Helping to manage labour costs before they occur.

Other payroll add-on system vendors who integrate to systems such as the new Attaché Payroll include:

Blaze Business Software: www.blaze.com.au
EmployeeConnect: www.employeeconnect.com
South Pacific Software: www.spss.net.au
TimeTarget: www.timetarget.net
WorkBuddy: www.workbuddy.net

11. Reducing the risk of fraud

Attaché Accounts All-In-One has a number of features that help reduce the opportunities for fraud.