A quality HR and payroll software solution can offer multiple benefits to your company. In this article, we help you choose a suitable system in the category for your business requirements. We also assess the pros and cons of outsourcing payroll versus processing it in-house to assist you to make an informed choice.
Benefits of HR and Payroll Software
A good HR and payroll platform offers the following advantages:
Minimizes Errors
Manual payroll calculation can lead to errors because of which your organization can incur potential fines. Payroll software decreases the risk of mistakes by automating complicated calculations and eliminating manual work. Accurate and timely paychecks can make your employees happy.
Saves Time
Manual payroll processing can take up valuable staff hours every pay period as your HR executives need to prepare paychecks, deliver them, manage direct deposits to employees’ bank accounts, and generate reports. A payroll tool can automate this work and enable your HR professionals to focus on important tasks like recruitment, onboarding, training, and staff management.
Improves Compliance
Your organization needs to keep up to date with the latest payroll regulations to remain compliant with local, state, and federal requirements. Compliance errors can result in hefty penalties. HR and payroll software can streamline compliance to eliminate legislative fees.
The product produces needed reports and simplifies the data required for government forms. You could also consider hiring a provider that can handle tax payments and filings on your firm’s behalf. This can give you peace of mind as you can rest assured that your firm’s payroll taxes are being managed on time and accurately.
Streamlines Payroll and HR
A quality HR and payroll system make it easier to manage work by integrating all applications in a single platform and window. It stores all HR, payroll, compliance, benefits, and other HR-related information in one centralized database. Thus, you don’t have to switch between multiple solutions but can use this single system to streamline HR and payroll.
Enhances Staff Engagement
Companies with an engaged workforce are more productive and profitable. Staff members will be more convenient if they can get visibility into their salary and finances and have control over the small things like workers’ compensation, viewing, and downloading payslips, managing time-offs, etc. Most payroll tools offer self-service features to enable personnel to see their time cards and pay stubs. These products also allow employees to autonomously view benefits information, 401(k) deductions, PTO tracking, and raise sick-leave requests.
Features to Consider while selecting an HR and Payroll Solution
Next, let’s look at the main features and aspects you should evaluate before you make a choice:
Assess Employee Needs
Evaluate the requirements of your workforce and empower them with a simple-to-use platform that shows all the key information to them like goals and feedback, skills, salary slips, etc. The software’s self-service portal should allow managers and employees to view and manage details like benefits, tax returns, key policies, and others. It should offer centralized information that can be easily accessed and used by your staff members and other authorized stakeholders.
Evaluate Features
UZIO carefully analyze the software’s functionality and consider the processes that should be integrated with the HR and payroll solution. These include leave management, compliance, taxes, salary, employee attendance, and more. Shortlist tedious functions that consume a lot of your personnel’s time and automate these tasks to boost productivity and efficiency.
Taxes and Compliance
Compliance is an important consideration when picking the right HR and payroll system. The software should be able to handle staff salary and taxes and adhere to local compliance norms. The HR and payroll solution should be capable of calculating taxes and handling regulations to save you time and money.
An integrated payroll and HR software can offer useful inputs to help you structure things efficiently. The product can also present automated checklists to assist you to properly complete the needed regulatory tasks and reports.
Workflow Management
The HR and payroll tool can assist to customize your organization’s workflows and automate routine HR processes. It can handle salary processing, document approvals, and task assignments, and send alerts and notices to stakeholders. Managers can set goals and notify their teams about them. They can review these goals periodically for performance appraisals and ratings. You can configure and trigger these automated HR workflows according to your requirements to make your personnel more productive.
Data Security
It is vital to protect sensitive HR and payroll information like benefits, social security numbers, tax returns, bank account details, staff compensation data, and others. The software should have strong security standards to safeguard this information. These measures should include role-based access, authorizations, and audit log for all system transactions.
Projects and Timesheets in the Cloud Platform
Remote working has become the norm and virtual workforces use digital technologies and tools to stay connected, engage, and collaborate. The HR software should offer features to create virtual teams that transcend locations. Employees should be able to access their work details, compensation, and benefits data, and other information from any place, anytime.
Ease of Use
It’s a difficult task for HR professionals to keep switching between multiple screens to perform their different tasks. A quality HR and payroll software can eliminate this tedious work as it offers all the needed HR and payroll information in a single platform and panel which eliminates needless scrolling and clicking. Besides, the solution is typically easy to learn and utilize so even lay users in your company can get the hang of it quickly without needing much training.
Insightful Metrics
The HR and payroll software can deliver insightful reports on key metrics and data that you can use to review and devise your company’s strategies and goals. These tools can help you to accurately measure issues like hiring costs and turnover rate. You can utilize the metrics to make data-based decisions to improve your company’s HR and payroll processes and management.
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Payroll vs In-house Processing
There are advantages and drawbacks to both outsourcing payroll and processing it in-house and organizations across the world debate and discuss them before making their decision. Let’s look at what each process entails and the differences between them.
In-house Processing
In this process, the company has a dedicated unit for payroll management in which staff members use payroll software that offers all the needed employee information. The payroll staff handles all data entry, calculations, and payment-related tasks. More effort is required in this procedure, but your company can exercise more control over payroll processing.
Outsourced Payroll Processing
Your firm can consider outsourcing payroll functions to a third-party provider that handles all the calculations and data. Your staff will then be not involved in payroll activities and can focus on other important work.
Advantages of Investing in a Quality HRIS Platform
In-house payroll management using a good HRIS solution offers benefits such as better privacy, easy data access, and cost-efficiency. You may need to hire more employees for the work but the system provides gains such as access to a range of added services, time and effort savings for your staff, and expert processing of payroll.
Why Should You Invest in an HRIS Product?
The software can give your company the needed resources to perform payroll processing in-house. You can retain better control and security over your payroll functions.
Reduces the Number of Required Staff
If your firm lacks the needed number of payroll experts, you need not worry as the HRIS application can fill the gap. You can assemble a small payroll processing team around the platform and give them the requisite training to efficiently use the software. Thus, for fast-growing companies, HR and payroll software can deliver many advantages.
Focus on Core Competencies
The HRIS system can speed up payroll processing and enable your HR professionals to concentrate on their core tasks. The solution can free up your HR staff’s time and energy to focus on the main tasks of improving the company’s growth and profitability.
Reduces Risk of Errors
Payroll processing mistakes can harm your enterprise’s image and affect employee morale. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure accurate payroll processing. Manual payroll management increases the chances of errors. So, it’s better to choose an HRIS product that can do the work expertly. Besides, payroll and compliance anomalies can result in large penalties and fines, and you can save these needless costs by investing in a reliable HR and payroll tool.
Keep Your Business Updated
The HRIS software can enable your firm’s payroll specialists to keep themselves updated on the latest payroll systems, technology, and regulations, and they can tailor their skills to fit your company’s needs. Payroll laws keep changing at regular intervals and it can be difficult to keep up with them and update your payroll processes accordingly. The payroll software can resolve this issue by delivering expert and up-to-date features as required.
Save Costs
You can save the costs of hiring extra staff to manage your HR and Payroll separately. Besides, your employees would need to spend a lot of time handling the manual tasks which translate to money. You can save these expenses by investing in an affordable HRIS platform. Most of the platforms usually work on a pay per employee basis, thus it’s more like a pay for what you need model.
Access All Payroll Features and Services
Payroll management involves plenty of work besides payments and your staff may not be trained for the job. An HRISand Payroll tool can capably handle tasks like payroll tax calculations, filing, and payments, performing complicated calculations and considerations like hourly or monthly wage, overtime, holiday records, deductions, direct deposits, and more.
Save Valuable Time
Your employees need not spend their valuable time manually managing payroll calculations and data but can focus on priority work. In this way, you can boost your employees’ efficiency and productivity and enable them to contribute more to improving your company’s profitability.
Tax Compliance
Besides paycheck accuracy, tax compliance is an important task for payroll departments. In-house teams are saddled with the big responsibility of remitting taxes in a timely and accurate manner. Tax calculation and filing is an important and sensitive element of your company’s finances and needs to be handled with great care.
By investing in an HRIS program, you can avail of expert and accurate tax calculation and filing assistance. This can give you peace of mind and confidence that your firm is efficiently meeting its tax compliance requirements.
Tools Offered by an HRIS Platform
A seamless HRIS software can offer payroll processing features like management of bonuses, overtime, incentives, reimbursements, travel expenses, and remuneration. It can help your firm’s HR, payroll, and accounting professionals to perform skillful payroll calculations and processing with a few easy clicks.
We hope this article has informed you thoroughly on the features and benefits of HR and payroll software. Based on your business needs, you can shortlist a bunch of leading tools, check their features via a free trial, and invest in the one that truly fits your business model without burning a hole in your pocket.
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