Your business is growing. You’ve employed a handful staff. You’re going places. Congratulations! All these steps are signs of succeeding as a business.
But now you’re using a lot of time to focus on managing the payroll of your small staff, ensuring you calculate salaries correctly, managing overtime, being the checks and balances of your business, managing staff, ensuring third-party payments happen on time and accurately – employee taxes, pensions and health insurance, visas.
Your head is spinning, and you have spent little or no time on business development. Every month. Most days of the month.
You’re bouncing a lot of balls around, and you know it might only be a matter of time before you miss one. And then you risk dropping the lot.
Payroll management software can take much of the burden of payroll maintenance off your shoulders. Perhaps you think: “But the cost. And I still need to spend time in training and maintaining the system. I have specific accounting software. I definitely don’t want to transfer all my finances to a new system when I’ve got one that works.” And so on.
But let me explain why payroll software should be a serious consideration for a small, growing business like yours, and let’s bust some myths.
Why you need a software solution
How do you choose a system for your business from the legion of payroll software options out there?
Start with identifying why you need a payroll management system. Some considerations to ponder include:
- Cost – Choosing the right payroll management system for you can save you a load of money in the long run. If you run payroll multiple times a month, for example, paying a monthly fee for the software will probably work out cheaper for you than paying each time you run payroll.
- HR – Do you want the system to manage other payroll and HR functions that you don’t have time for? Some systems do more than issue payslips and process tax forms. They allow employees to edit their personal details, like a change of address, or manage their leave through the system.
- Integration – You already have other automated systems in place, like your financial reporting. When you want to pick a payroll management system, it has to integrate with your accounting system for save you the precious time you’re looking to free up by getting payroll software.
- Features – Different systems do different things. Think about what features you need, and avoid paying for features that don’t benefit your business.
There are numerous benefits to implementing payroll software, but we’re going to look at six in particular.
Key benefit 1: Happy staff
Happy staff makes your business more successful. They are key. Keep them on your side. With payroll software your operation can run more efficiently and minimize payroll mistakes. This is imperative for staff morale and your reputation as an employer, if you want the best talent in the house.
Key benefit 2: Accuracy and compliance
Again, payroll software reduces the risk of human error and ensures automatic compliance with regulations and legislation, such as timely and accurate tax payments, staying abreast of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and automatic enrolment of pension benefits. Accuracy reduces the risks of penalties, legal problems and destroying employee morale. And you’ll have automatic reminders to do specific tasks at specific times of the cycle.
Key benefit 3: Save time
Payroll can be a time-consuming process. Using payroll software cut down the time spent on payroll processing and reconciliation, allowing more time spent on other tasks in the business.
Key benefit 4: Enhanced data security
Keeping company, employee and customer data secure is essential. Payroll contains personal information of employees, like birth dates, addresses and bank details. It is your responsibility to protect that information. Pick the best payroll software with state-of-the-art security. This key benefit alone is the best reason for switching to a payroll management system.
Key benefit 5: Easier financial year-end
Most payroll software offers automatic tracking, recording and reporting, making year-end so much easier. Integrating your payroll system with your accounting system is also possible, and if that’s a requirement for you, there are many that provide integration with other software.
Key benefit 6: No experience needed
You don’t need an accounting background or specialist payroll knowledge to run payroll software. So you can assign payroll tasks to staff who have no accounting background and allow for cross-training while keeping costs down.
If you want your operations to be efficient, lean, cost-effective and have happy workers to boot, explore payroll software solutions for your business today.
Want to know more about how OPS can help you with your HR & Payroll?