Blog

May 27, 2015

How to Improve Your Payroll Practices in 5 Steps

cover_single-8

It’s really hard to deny that having  good payroll practices is incredibly important to running a business properly. Whether you are a small or big business, getting your employees paid on time and without error is vital. Furthermore, preparing your taxes and generally running a tight ship when it comes to your bookkeeping is imperative to the stability and sustainability of your business.

Of course, there are a lot of companies that outsource their payroll process completely, but many smaller business do not have the luxury (the money) to do so.

And in the event that your payroll process is inefficient, there is a good chance that you are losing money and time. That’s the bottom line.

Here are some ideas any small business owner should considering implementing, if they haven’t already, that will surely improve payroll practices significantly.

Switch from Manual to Automated Immediately

It’s 2015, so this should already be a given. But if you are someone who is still creating spreadsheets, or even worse, writing down your payroll data by hand, it’s time to stop. Not only is this way of doing it slow and ineffective, it’s also incredibly prone to a good payroll sheet’s greatest enemy – human error.

Using an automated software solution for putting your timesheets together is the only way to go these days. It takes the possibility of human error out of the equation, it saves you tons of time, and it gives you much cleaner and more accurate payroll data.

Define Your Policies Better

The clearer your payroll policies are, they easier everything is to organize and calculate. Some businesses require complicated policies, especially if they have a distributed team operating in different parts of the world.

Whether your policies are simple or complex, they need to be defined accurately in order to avoid confusion. Create company rules regarding leave requests, overtime, commissions, and make sure that your employees are well aware of them.

It will make the entire process easier for you or whoever ends up processing your payroll data in the end.

calendar

Use a Calendar and Follow It Religiously

If you don’t have a clear, defined and concise payroll calendar, you are creating unnecessary problems for yourself for the get-go. Having a calendar that tells you precisely when payroll activities schedule and sticking to it will help you and your employees.

Set clear deadlines for when all time cards, pay stubs, expense reports, and all other pertinent information needs to be in, and most importantly, stick to it.

If you are paying some of your staff weekly and some monthly, no problem. Just make a clear calendar for each circumstance. No policy is too complex if it’s well-organized.

Integrate As Much As Possible

Integrating your payroll process with other tools that you use on an everyday basis at work can really help make the process a lot cleaner. HR and payroll are so closely tied together that integrating whatever you are using to keep track of your employees’ time and attendance and leave requests with your payroll process seems inherently logical.

Business management software like Humanity allows you to do just that. By having your time and attendance, leave, schedule, and payroll information neatly organized within one central application, you are providing a level of connectivity between this crucial data that makes payroll processing that much simpler and more intuitive.

Include Employees In the Process

Letting employees help you out in the process will not only empower them, it will also decrease the amount of work you need to do. Once again, and app like Humanity that let’s employees clock in and out of work by themselves and request shift trades and vacation days independently significantly decreases the amount of work you need to do.

By allowing employees to perform these types of activities on their own, you are giving yourself more time to make sure that you are accurately taking care of all of the other payroll issues that require more time and effort.

Conclusion

The conclusion is as clear as day. Using Humanity allows you to make all five of these changes to your payroll efforts in order to improve and speed up the entire process. Leave spreadsheets behind and get intuitive, determine all payroll policies ahead of time, set deadlines, integrate payroll with time and attendance features, and empower your employees, with just one application – Humanity.