Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to survival for small, even medium-sized businesses in today’s highly competitive markets. Forget weeks, a lag of days or even hours can prove crucial to a certain outcome, so why should your business run that risk each month when it’s time to pay your employees?
The Problem with Manual Payroll Processing
It all boils down to time and accuracy. Even with a workforce of ~50 employees, manually creating and reviewing payroll can become a major time sink. You also have to factor in the cost of the employees tasked on this project. Between that and the tedium of double and triple checking potential errors, manual payroll processing today is counterintuitive to the very idea of a lean small/medium business. Delays are inevitable, and potentially disruptive – no company of this size can afford to lose their top performers because they weren’t paid in a timely manner.
Why should payroll management suffer in the analogue era when digital technology is enabling so many aspects of businesses?
Automating to Eliminate Mistakes, Faster
Granted, some initial training of the automation tool / software would be necessary, but by and large the move to a digital payroll solution is both smart and just plain better. Correcting an error becomes as simple as merely tapping a few times on a keyboard, rather than poring over reams of paper trying to locate the mistake. Spotted a blunder that made its way to several locations? A few taps on the keyboard fix that. Updating records at the last minute? A few taps. Need necessary approvals to finalize processing? A few taps.
It’s so easy, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember a time when you didn’t have this essential service.
Let the Computers do the Calculations
The very first digital payroll management was nothing more than glorified spreadsheets, very similar to the analogue versions. A lot of the legwork still fell on the employee running the tool. Later on, salary / wage calculations and deductions would become additional modules that let your team blitz through tasks previously considered incredibly time-consuming. Tax calculations, in particular, were and still remain the bane of any manual payroll system.
With digital tech now handling all the heavy lifting, payroll automation software can now provide even more value to your small business. A consequence of technology is the rise of the freelancer, the contract worker. These essential parts of the modern workforce completely upend manual payroll, as their wages do not get processed in the same way as “standard” employees. You need tools that have the flexibility to process monthly, weekly, hourly or even task-based payments. These sought-after features were once the domain of big-budget and expensive software like QuickBooks, definitely something not every small-scale business can afford. Lucky, then, that the payroll software industry has an excellent variety available in the form of competitors such as PeopleSonic, payroll solution that is targeted specifically at small to medium-sized businesses.
Why break the bank to achieve essential payroll automation, or worse, forego it for the archaic manual systems?
Impeccable Record Storage, Instant Withdrawal
Is your accounts or finance team still doing payroll by hand? A quick way to answer that is to look at or around their offices. Do you spot absolute mountains of papers inside bulky file folders? How motivated does it make you feel to locate and peruse the payroll record of a specific employee?
Digital storage becomes available to your HR department (and the accounts/finance teams) the moment you switch to automation – you can reinforce this record-keeping through data duplication or preferably cloud storage. That’s a feature manual payroll can never have, the ability to store critical information long-term and peruse it fully and instantaneously. This feature helps your business and your employees both – no one wants to search for that one piece of paper months down the line.
Running your payroll no longer has to involve human and financial capital coupled with extended time and effort expenditure. There are now smart automated solutions available that can ramp up your efficiency several fold and put a smile on your employees’ faces each month. There is no reason to not do that, today.