2018 New Year resolutions for payroll professionals

Author: Ian Hurst — Managing Director, Paymaster People Solutions

The new year has started with a bang! Payroll-related queries are already piling up. The January 2018 payday is now only 1 week away. December 2017’s filing is still not done. And then, to top it all, the recent December-holiday is now long-forgotten. In fact, you might even be thinking, “What holiday!”

Before the new year  gets too crazy, allow me suggest 5 New Year’s resolutions for you to think about—payroll resolutions that might well translate into worthy goals for your payroll department to strive for.

Go and grab yourself a cup of coffee, then read this—something interesting for you to consider:

Automation

You need to automate to save time. Make sure that you are uploading as much as you can. No more manual capturing of documents is necessary. Set up templates so that employee and staff onboarding (plus other routine tasks) can happen quickly, efficiently and without error. For example, consider optimising your department’s imported hours process so that you need only import one batch for all hours. This would be a great start don’t you think?

Employee self-service

If you are still printing payslips, ask yourself why you’re still doing so in this day and age. In today’s commercial world, this is not good industry best-practice at all. Instead, secure a payroll solution that offers a robust employee self-service portal which can distribute employee payslips via email. Note of caution:  be sure to check that all your company and employee data and information is secure. This prevents such data and information from falling into the wrong hands.

Managers view

Give your line managers access to your payroll system. This allows them to access their own subordinates’ employee-details. Empower your line-management by allowing them to login and see their subordinates’ leave days. Similarly, your line managers ought to be the first port-of-call for all payroll related queries.

Training

Be sure to stay up to date—Keep training yourself (and your staff) on payroll processes, payroll legislation and communication skills.

Go paperless

Now is an opportune time to truly ‘go paperless’—At very least, go as paperless as you can. In our environmentally threatened world, we can no longer be excused for cutting down trees. The viable (best-practice alternative to paper) is to convert to the use of electronic documents. This way, using electronic equivalents of traditional hard-copy documents can now be conveniently (and affordably)  stored/saved in your own online digital cloud.

So there you have it: make these five key areas your focus for this year!