Payroll administration is stressful. Monthly tax submissions and biannual reconciliations demand considerable time and focus. Payroll teams work long hours to collect information, get sign-offs, generate reports, adjust calculations, and file accurate submissions.
This constant cycle puts considerable pressure on payroll administrators, who would like to streamline and automate as much of the process as possible.
“Managing payrolls involves a lot of moving parts,” says Ania Strydom, compliance research manager at payroll platform PaySpace. “There’s Pay As You Earn, Unemployment Insurance Fund contributions, and the Skills Development Levy. There are medical aid updates. There are bonuses, shift work, and overtime. There are changes to regulations.
“It’s a massive headache when you’re expected to regularly file submissions, because you can get information late from employees or managers, and your reconciliation process is being interrupted by requests for reports or other paperwork.”
In many cases, it’s the payroll software that creates these bottlenecks and prevents administrators from streamlining their work. Strydom recommends six ways that payroll teams can reduce their submission headaches, getting things done faster and more accurately:
- Automate payroll processes: When payroll staff don’t have the right tools to automate data capture, report generation, or ensure accurate calculations, they spend a lot of time doing these manually. Most payroll software doesn’t provide extensive automation, so the teams work around what they have at their disposal. Cloud-native payroll platforms offer a wealth of automation and streamlining features, such as data integration, customised questionnaires, and self-service for employees.
- Get the right people involved: Payroll administrations, whether they are in a dedicated payroll department or part of another grouping such as finance or human resources, rely on input from other groups and departments that don’t prioritise payroll tasks. This creates miscommunications, errors, and time-consuming approval loops. A cloud-native payroll platform eases the burden on third parties by securely extending appropriate interfaces so they can seamlessly do tasks like enter payroll information, generate relevant reports, and give sign-offs.
- Automatic regulation updates: Payroll administration must comply with their region’s employment laws that can and do change—a particularly difficult situation for multinationals. Non-compliance exposes their companies to fines, yet payroll teams can often wait months for software vendors to process updates to legislation that impact calculations and data fields. In contrast, modern cloud-native payroll platforms push changes quickly and automatically, seamlessly reflecting new regulations in calculations.
- Collect data smartly: Administrators spend days, even weeks, collecting and capturing relevant information from different parties and sources. This cumbersome approach compensates for isolated, unstandardised data sources. Modern payroll platforms use secure cloud technologies to query different sources and compile the data into a universal data standard, automatically collecting and formatting the information for payroll administrators.
- Offer employee self-service: Traditional payroll processes require staff to manually source documents such as payslips or leave allocations on behalf of employees, causing delays and frustration. Cloud-native software provides employee self-service (ESS) features, enabling direct document access. For instance, PaySpace enables employees to retrieve payroll and leave documents via WhatsApp, eliminating administrative bottlenecks.
- Access payroll information from anywhere: Payroll administrators are often limited to where they can access payroll software. But they can securely log into cloud-native payroll platforms from anywhere with different devices. They can work on payroll on their laptop at home or on their phone while waiting for a flight. The platform also extends these secure access features to other parties, radically simplifying data capture, reporting, and approvals, and encouraging continual payroll processes.
Reduce payroll’s pressures
Such game-changing advantages are due to a new generation of powerful, accessible, and affordable software. Most organisations assume that this is just how things work, unaware of such game-changing advantages, which is why they stoically stick to their traditional software.
But payroll administrators have to make up the difference, which costs them valuable time and mental focus. They persistently tolerate manual processes, difficulty capturing information, manual adjusting calculations, and chasing other people for updates and sign-offs.
This doesn’t need to be the situation anymore. Payroll professionals can now streamline, automate, and accurately administer payroll tasks—starting with these six tips, powered by the revolution in payroll platforms.