The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost all imaginable aspects of how businesses function. All sectors of the economy are invariably affected to some degree. Even within organizations, it is hard to come across departments that have not been facing some form of difficulty due to the pandemic and its aftermath. The process of payroll and payroll management has also taken a hit. With global markets put in a state of unparalleled volatility and with employees and consumers stuck at their homes, companies are forced to rethink how to execute tasks even as foundational as payroll management.
Possibility Of Errors
While most employers don’t deliberately underpay their employees, even before the pandemic, errors did occur. Outdated payroll systems are the top culprit of payroll errors. It is easy to see why outdated processes can hurt both the employer and the employees. Payroll management is an information-heavy task. Numbers and data in different forms have to be transferred multiple times from timesheets to spreadsheets, from spreadsheets to graphs and final records. There are conversions to be done, formats to be checked and accounted for. When we put all these steps together, the extent to which things can go wrong becomes very evident. When we also add to this the pandemic-induced complications like employee benefits and changes to the payroll for employees who work from home, the task at hand becomes even more complex.
Manual Processing Is Slow & Lacks Efficiency
Payrolls are incredibly dynamic, and the process demands accuracy to be efficient and error-free. Many organizations manage payrolls manually, but this has proven to be an unnecessary ordeal that is inefficient and prone to errors. With workforces under lockdown, it was all the more difficult for the staff to gather information from different teams at different locations, handle timesheets, check for errors, validate data, and adjust pay components where allowances had changed. Payroll systems that rely on manual processes and have difficulty processing and automatically updating data on-the-go, become bottlenecks of inefficiencies. This has made it imperative for businesses to outsource payroll and adopt software solutions for the management of payrolls. Besides, older batch-driven payroll systems are painfully slow and the conditions that we face today demand that these software’s be able to handle large amounts of data in a flexible and fast manner, standardize and validate data efficiently, and produce reports that are easy to read.
Compliance Risks
Compliance is a complicated subject for most businesses. It is easy to get lost in the wilderness of the language of the legal and the contractual, and this can be a challenging hurdle to overcome without the right tools at your disposal. The pandemic has also led to changes in labor regulations and social security mandates in many countries, and the payroll has to reflect these changes. Without the ability to check and validate payroll information against the existing legislations, compliance becomes a pandemic-fuelled nightmare. Most legacy payroll systems rely on manual validation, and this requires businesses to have specialist employees skilled and qualified to read, comprehend and apply legal regulations. Time often needs to be allocated to attend seminars and explainers to stay abreast of new regulations and processes. To bring down non-compliance risks, it is important to adopt the most up-to-date payroll management systems. It would be a very productive investment of your resources to outsource payroll management to qualified specialists so that you can focus on your core business. By outsourcing payroll, companies can save the time and energy spent to plan how to manage payrolls effectively and how to keep payroll records regularly updated and verified.
Complicated & Non-User Friendly Payroll Systems
Hard-to-use payroll systems are another point of tension for the employers and payroll teams. Generally speaking, multifunction payroll systems are large, unintuitive, and not user-friendly. They are not the kind of software that you can just open and use. They come with complicated instruction manuals and steep learning curves. Understandably, during the pandemic, employers found it hard to run training programs for the staff hired to work with payroll systems. The newer generation of post-pandemic systems must be intuitive and easy to use. The learning curve must be kept to a minimum, and the instruction manuals and training programs should be lean and mean so that businesses can adopt these systems with ease. Some features might have to be compromised or even completely removed, but it is fair to say that most companies value usability more than featurefulness. Hiring a professional service that offers an integrated and holistic approach to payroll management is the best option for companies seeking to focus on their growth. These services take care of most payroll-related tasks, including submitting tax documents, ensuring compliance, generating easy-to-read final reports, keeping up with regulations and changes in the law, etc.
The Need To Outsource & Update
Payrolls can be tricky, and when done wrong, they can cause significant hurdles for the advancement of your business. To maximize operational efficiency and boost employee morale, payrolls should be optimized to be error-free and smooth. Based on the issues and challenges faced during the pandemic, the choice of payroll system should be based on some essential features that facilitate the smooth functioning of the organization. They should be easy to use and intuitive and should come with a gentle learning curve. Compliance should be in-built so that your payment is proper every time, and the complicated legal contracts and regulations don’t affect the smooth functioning of your organization. Recurrent processes can be automated, and the resulting system should involve minimal manual work so that the chances of error are kept to a minimum. The pandemic situation also has taught us that having a cloud-based HR system will be greatly advantageous to the optimum functioning of the business in times of endless work-from-homes and lockdowns. Timeliness, accuracy, security, and scalability are crucial features without which the payroll systems can have a detrimental effect on your business goals.
Working with older manual payroll systems during the current situation can be extremely challenging and even disastrous. Engaging with experts regarding payroll accounting, superannuation and compliance will go a long way towards increasing your work productivity and cutting costs. Hiring managed payroll service providers who offer effective payroll processes saves the business time and money, which, when reinvested in your company, can dramatically improve your bottom line.
BSH Conclusion:
It has become apparent that the recent Covid outbreak has put businesses of all scales on the brink of crisis. As a result, more businesses are looking for ways to drive efficiencies and success in a post-covid world. Transforming the tedious, time-consuming, and costly payroll process by outsourcing them or automating them can be one of the most viable solutions to drive efficiencies in a post-pandemic business world.
Following ten years of partnership with world-leader ADP (Automated Data processing) and servicing over 300 multinationals operating in the Middle East, BSH has secured a leading regional role in the fast-growing global payroll. BSH payroll services come in either ‘Processing’ or ‘Managed Service’ mode. The streamlined one-click payroll generation platform offered by BSH eliminates human errors and delivers a timely, accurate and secure payroll for all agile payroll requirements.