PeopleSonic’s HR management platform has been upgraded with new features, implemented with greater team productivity and HR efficiency in mind. After last week’s deep dive into timesheets, this week we will look into leave liability reports, what function they perform, and how to make the most out of them.

Leave liability reports can be accessed in the PeopleSonic product under the payroll menu. Let’s get started.

What is leave liability?

Employees are entitled to a certain number of leaves a year, based on their employment status (permanent, full-time, or part-time – contract employee

s generally don’t accrue leaves). Leave liability is the financial value for all types of leaves accrued by the employee, that is owed to them by the company. 

What does a leave liability report include?

A leave liability report is a detailed breakdown of an employee’s pay cycle, the leaves they have accrued, and their financial liability. Below is a look at what the PeopleSonic leave liability report looks like:

The weekly pay rates (ordinary and average) are determined by the laws of your particular country, as is the holiday pay liability – these are used in conjunction with the number of leaves accrued to calculate the leave liability per employee.

Automating the leave liability report

Leave liability is generally a manual and collaborative effort between finance and HR departments to calculate and record the relevant data into balance sheets. Manually generating a leave liability report, whether on a daily or weekly basis, would involve daily communication, checks, and balances to make sure the most updated information is fed into these reports for managers and the company decision-makers. Not only would that be a time taking process, but would also be prone to mistakes due to so many moving parts involved.

PeopleSonic helps centralize and automate the leave liability report – a single datasheet where you can sort by employee name and date is a powerful tool that is updated automatically based on data picked up from other features of the product. This means that managers can, at the press of a button, get the latest numbers for any employee’s leave liability, which would let them evaluate the cost of an employee potentially leaving, among other things.

The need for leave liability reports

Companies need to have on the fly access to leave liability reports for balancing financial liabilities, work output, and employee welfare. That’s because employees who don’t take the fixed yearly leaves accrue a higher financial liability to the company, but it also negatively impacts their mental and physical health, which in turn can affect the quality of their work. On the other hand, poorly planned mandatory time-off can also impact project timelines and work output on time-sensitive tasks.

Smaller businesses can’t afford to have dedicated resources in finance and HR collaborating and managing annual leaves and liabilities, but it is a critical task that needs to be performed. That’s where solutions like PeopleSonic come into play, with dedicated reports to help reduce the workload involved in strategizing around leave liabilities. With this feature rolling out soon, small to medium-sized businesses can quickly take advantage of it by offloading a lot of manual labor to the PeopleSonic platform!

 

As more and more businesses move HR from a pen and paper department to a web-based smart operation, those left behind have a choice to make: do they stay in the past or do they take that necessary step into the future?

To add to the decision-making worry, there are two major ways HR is managed digitally: Bespoke services that manage a singular aspect and nothing else, and HR platforms where all aspects are managed and integrated into each other to provide an end-to-end solution.

Let’s resolve any lingering doubts you may have about the efficacy of these integrated HR platforms by taking a look at just how they excel over ‘traditional’ HR management.

You Get Centralized Core Services

A major complaint that arises with the sheer breadth of scope of most HR teams is the fact that data gets scattered far and wide. Collating that data when it is requested can become a hassle when it is divided across several apps, systems and files, there’s also the additional possibility of errors when combining said data into a singular report.

An integrated HR platform basically renders every such problem moot. Most integrated HR systems provide an all-in-one dashboard for managing employee data, such as:

• Employee contact and personal information
• Job designation
• Department / Team within company
• Employee documents / contracts

Additionally, these dashboard enable HR to manage data permissions and privacy controls to every employee in the company, and store all this data to the platform’s secure cloud servers, from one convenient location!

You Get Additional Services Like Payroll and Leave Management

Most HR functions beyond employee data management and onboarding are lengthy, tedious and no less essential. Payroll and leave management are two of the biggest and most demanding of those functions – ‘traditional’ HR management structures have multiple people tasked specially to fulfill these functions, making them a major manpower sink. Being human-driven also leaves these critical services prone to errors and mistakes.

Modern integrated HR platforms such as PeopleSonic pride themselves on providing turn-key solutions to the looming problems of payroll and leave management. These integrated solutions provide dedicated applications within the platform which exclusively manage payroll and leaves, while fully exposing their data to the central dashboard to enable analytics, tracking and updates.   

You Get Instant, Detailed Analytics

As mentioned earlier, the biggest boost that integrated HR platforms provide businesses comes in the form of analytics. The modern business world is exceedingly data-driven, which refers to understanding data and using those analyses to inform decision making. Knowing how to make sense of the data collected becomes far more necessary than the act of collection itself, and that is where your business profits from these platforms.

Rather than having an employee gather data, run it through their performance metrics and guidelines and create a report from that, HR platforms use their integrated nature to call data from the relevant application, analyze it and generate the required reports, all from one button click! Harnessing the computing power of the platforms also provides thorough analyses that would otherwise take HR days to produce.

You Get to Save Time

It must be evident by now that if your business still executes its HR functions through personnel only (and using paper rather than digital), you are wasting a hefty chunk of your employee’s time on things that integrated HR platforms now do instantly, or automatically on a schedule. By removing the burden of menial tasks, HR teams get freed up to tackle higher value goals for the business. The same goes for time saved each month on processing payroll, and especially the time saved in following up on leave approvals, statuses and accruals.

While the difference in time efficiency gained when using an integrated solution to using several solutions for HR management is not as dramatic as that between analogue and digital, it is still significant. That is especially true given how highly competitive today’s industries are, and even a minor advantage becomes critical in the long run.

You Get Increased Productivity 

A consequence of HR systems that doesn’t get enough spotlight is the increase in employee productivity through time and attendance management. By observing and understanding employee behaviour, managers and HR can best formulate ways to motivate teams to arrive on time, which would in turn boost and elevate the work culture of that organization. 

Time is money may be a cliche, but it is one that is painfully important to businesses, whether they’re small or even multinational. That’s why managers and team leads are always looking for data on employee attendance and how to maximise it. By analyzing this data, a more productive work culture can be created, one based on trust with the employees.

 

While the idea of using exclusive, specialist software to look after various HR functions can sound enticing, getting those applications to play nicely with each other can prove to be challenging, sometimes even futile. That’s why an integrated HR platform that is essentially an end-to-end solution for managing HR will always appeal more to businesses, and with good reason. What’s more, modern HR platforms even allow a lot of customisation features that can tailor that platform to your business’s specific needs, one which can easily augment the benefits you gain by moving your business from ‘traditional’ HR management to an integrated, all-in-one platform.

Whether you are part of the HR team for a large business, or the sole face of HR for a small firm, the a-z of managing time-off taken by employees, i.e. leave management, is a complicated, lengthy affair. For smaller businesses especially, there is often the added hassle of having to use a manual, non-centralized system, even if it is augmented with tools such as spreadsheets and macros to automate those sheets.

What does this mean for the HR personnel managing leaves? Is there really enough of a verifiable improvement to automating leave management that can justify discarding established practices? Let’s find out. 

Understanding The Need For Automation Of Leave Management

Remember the manual or non-centralized leave management system referenced earlier? Here’s what that means for you, the HR: 

It means that you are stuck collating leave applications from phone calls, Zoom calls, emails, text messages and IM apps like WhatsApp or Messenger onto a central location; following up with team managers for approvals and then collating that while also informing employees on the outcome. This doesn’t even factor in keeping track of leaves accrued by each individual employee and the back and forth involved with team leads in getting the necessary approvals – it’s all too much! How can you keep everyone up-to date at all times if you are doing this manually?

Another essential reason in favour of automation applies to those businesses who have employees spread globally – you need to ensure your business is adhering to the labor laws of the employees’ home countries. All those country-specific variances need to be calculated and associated with the right employees, manual management leaves a chance for human error which would have tough consequences. 

The Benefits of a Dedicated Leave Management System

The case for automation is strong, but we understand that businesses need to see tangible benefits to adopting an entirely new process. Let’s speak in those terms.

The biggest benefit by far to any organization adopting a leave management system is the simplicity and ease-of-use. This applies to everyone from the employee to the team leads, admin and HR personnel accessing the system on the employer side. 

For HR, it cuts down the inconvenience of keeping track of leave requests (especially, as mentioned above, they come from a variety of sources) and associated follow-ups. Employees and employers alike can keep track of an application in process and not have to wait for a timely response to their communique. 

For managers and team leads, it cuts down the hassle of scrolling those massive spreadsheets looking for information on a specific employee’s leave entitlements. If they are using a modern, smarter HR platform like PeopleSonic , they will also have access to a centralized dashboard where they can easily see the status of every employee, summary reports and leave types accrued. This allows effective communication between employees and managers, and enables them to schedule workloads accordingly and prevents loss of productivity due to someone’s leave notification slipping through the cracks.

What does this all amount to? In a sentence: increased productivity. This happens in several ways. First, it frees up HR significantly by reducing the tedium associated with leave management. That time can be spent in pursuing holistic improvements to the company instead of being spent on admin tasks. Second, it gives managers a clear view on which team members are scheduled for leave and planning projects and work tasks accordingly, saving significant time costs. A major admin cost associated with manual leave management was the problem of planning around leaves that employees were entitled to in a way that did not impact productivity and waste resources. Leave management systems can make that a thing of the past.

Let’s say you’re convinced to make the jump, what leave management system do you choose? There are a few available in the market but every business’s needs may vary, so the platform needs to be customizable while also affordable – small businesses often can’t afford to splurge. Here are some of the things you should look out for to find the leave management system that is right for you.

What A Great Leave Management System Brings To The Table

Compliance

As companies become increasingly global, there is a greater proportion of remote employees based in countries around the world, each with their own set of labor laws and even public holidays! 

Any modern leave management system needs to be able to handle this variety, and in fact provide instant information to HR and management about a specific country’s specific leave types, rule-of-law requirements and any other legalities necessary to operate ethically. 

This may seem like a small thing, but adherence to labor laws is the cornerstone of a good working relationship between employees and employers and needs to be catered to by your leave management system.

Real-Time, Anywhere Access

In the era of an always-online workforce, your leave management system needs to be on par with those technologies. That means a UI that is web and mobile friendly, real-time status of leave entitlements and applications in-progress, simplified request forms and approval steps and flexibility to modify relevant parameters (leave types, application rules and reporting hierarchy) as needed by the business.

Frankly, if a platform is limiting you on how you or your employees access it, that is not the HR platform for you.

Peace Of Mind

The primary goal of shifting to any smart, automated system is peace of mind. Once it is set up, you never want to have to consider any of the problems that existed before it. For a leave management system, that means it provides peace of mind to HR in the following ways: no more time wasted checking the public holiday calendar of a specific country, or tracking down managers regarding signing off on leaves, or having to search through complicated datasheets to calculate leave balances. 

Peace of mind also means flexibility to adapt to any business’s evolving requirements and rules. The ability to have standard, pre-configured rules and regulations promises ease of implementation, the freedom to update or modify those rules per department or per team means that every employee and manager is happy to keep things operating to their own needs. 

And finally, a great leave management system, as part of an effective HR platform, provides peace of mind by removing human errors (in calculations, reporting or planning) and leveraging the data-driven leave system (among others) to give the business greater power in making informed, strategic decisions.

In a year where a global pandemic has impacted every aspect of businesses, HR has not escaped unscathed but in fact have had to adapt the fastest to the slew of new issues faced by employees and coming up with helpful, impactful solutions. A modern, flexible leave management system that can encompass a change as drastic as that one could mean the difference between failing business and one where employees remain engaged and satisfied as we work together through these trying times.