No matter how small or big a business is, the team behind it keeps working effortlessly to get the work done. As the business expands, the recruitment in the departments increases hence making a bigger team of talented people working together. In the mid of handling the departments, individually or in a group, the HR works hard every second for the smooth communication among the hierarchy. More employees mean more work when it comes to salaries. Hence, to help these issues out, automating the payroll system has proven to be a great help. Have you faced this problem where a basic human error has caused big issues during the payrolls and the whole flow has been collapsed?

Why opt for an automated payroll system?

Stats show that businesses have opted for automated payroll systems which has resulted in 80% reduction in the payroll costs, overall. This includes a significant amount of human errors like mistakes in invoices, cheques, and etcetera that are issued to the employee.
Another study shows that almost 90% of the companies have now moved to an automated payroll systems with direct salary transfers, paperless payrolls, and new options of self-services. It also reduced the workload of HR as self-service allows employees to add personal information in the tools.

Benefits of Automating a Payroll System

There are tons of benefits of an automated payroll system and here are some of them

1- Payment Calculation

The automated payroll system basically uses payroll tools that require manual input to compute all the wages by calculating gross to net earnings of the employees. Hence, the accuracy of the results completely depends on the accuracy of manual input. So, in case, a terminated employee is due some severance payment and the payroll employee forgets to make his entry, the tool won’t update any payment. Such software and tools work best as long as the entries are entered correctly. So, the better option is to go for full automation tools like peoplesonic. Such software performs all the types of payments including hourly, weekly, overtime, double-time, commissions, bonuses, salaries, raises and etc. So basically, the automated payroll system does automated payment calculation and eliminates the manual paycheck writing and does direct transfers.

2- Efficiency

As it’s been already mentioned that payroll automation helps to reduce the overall time that is consumed in the manual payroll system processing that employee information, salaries, taxes, and etc. However, there are additional efficiencies presented by payroll tools as well. For example, these tools can be integrated into other systems and can help to track employees time, performance, reports, development, and other HR systems. This efficiency can be seen in the end when there is no manual work left.

3- Automated salary slips to employees

These tools have also diminished the manual work of generating salary slips and sending it to each employee according to the corporate SOP. Some businesses send salary slips every month and some don’t. They only generate if an employee asks for it because of some reason like for opening a bank account and etc. So, this is a plus point of an automated payroll tool that it generates salary slips after the transfer of salaries and individually emails it to each employee every month.

4- Security

The more a tool can help us, there is always a fear of data security. But you don’t have to worry as the automated payroll system will have more of a robust information security system that can easily prevent the leakage of sensitive informative data of the organization. The system’s dashboard can easily help the organization track the changes made in the data by which individual and when.

These tools and software can also help small businesses because they can be run without hiring multiple individuals. Also, there is no expert-level needed to run these tools. Keeping in mind the current scenario of quarantine, software like these are a blessing in disguise for you to manage a huge chunk of responsibility without creating any hassle.

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.