Payroll processing is one of the most essential functions of a business. Investing in high-quality payroll software ensures employees are compensated properly and on time.
Automating your payroll eliminates manual errors in payment calculations, filing, and reporting. Look for a program that supports direct deposit, salary tracking, and compliance management.
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Reporting and Analytics
Payroll compliance features are a must for businesses with strict requirements for insurance and taxes. This ensures that payroll data is accurate and secure, protecting your company from costly non-compliance penalties. Look for a system that keeps track of these regulations and allows HR and accounting staff to monitor changes easily.
A good payroll solution should also enable business intelligence and reporting capabilities to provide insights into payroll processes and employee trends. This helps your team make informed decisions that can improve efficiencies and help your business grow.
Look for a scalable system to meet your business needs as it grows. It should be easy to add new users and adjust workflows and checklists so that all processes stay on track without any delays or errors. This is especially important if your company uses different departments such as Human Resources, Finance, and Accounting. Choose payroll solution companies with experience working with organizations of your size and industry. They will have the expertise to help you implement a successful payroll system.
Automated Payroll
Payroll is the business process of calculating employee earnings and accounting for payroll taxes and benefits withholdings. It also includes processing salary adjustments, adding new employees, recordkeeping, and generating paychecks, pay stubs, and direct deposit. Automated payroll software makes the calculations for you, so HR and finance professionals can spend more time on other important tasks.
It helps to eliminate manual processes that are prone to errors. Rather than copying and pasting data, an automated system gathers the relevant information for you. It makes the necessary calculations to ensure that tax deductions are correct and payments are made timely.
The best payroll systems automatically communicate with biometric time-attendance devices to import employee attendance and leave data. The software can then calculate the time an employee has worked based on their swipe card, badge, or handprint. This saves time for the employee who no longer needs to clock in and out using a physical device while also providing the business with accurate data. It also offers employees a simple self-service portal to access their payslips, annual leave entitlements, and performance reviews.
Employee Self-Service
Good payroll software should offer self-service features. This helps employees get all payroll-related information and forms easily without asking for it from HR or the accounting team. It saves time and makes the employee experience better.
The ESS system must be able to provide the previous payslips to the employees, change in tax withholding details, direct deposit changes, and leave balance updates. It must also display the company policies and procedures and the full company handbook to give employees a central place to find the important information they need.
It is important to have a payroll system that can support the statutory norms and allocation rules in all countries where your business has a presence. A good payroll solution should have a feature to help you comply and avoid penalties from the authorities.
In today’s remote-friendly work landscape, it is very common to have international employees. It is important to choose a payroll solution that supports global operations to take advantage of the best talent worldwide.
Integrations
Payroll systems with integrated features serve as a single record system for all employee data. When an employee gets paid for overtime, the change is automatically reflected in time and attendance records and vice versa. Additionally, employees who go on leave or terminate employment are logged in the headcount and benefits reports. This feature also eliminates HR teams needing to track these changes through email chains or spreadsheets.
This feature enables payroll managers to comply with federal, state, and local tax regulations. It automates the calculation of gross wages, taxes, and deductions, which reduces mistakes that could lead to penalties or fines.
The best payroll solutions are constantly updated to comply with changing laws, tax guidelines, and employer reporting requirements. Look for providers that offer support in all regions where your employees work or have partnerships with providers that do. They should also provide encryption, firewalls, and multi-factor authentication to protect sensitive information from accidental or malicious attacks. This is especially important if you plan on using an API or hiring third-party developers to add more features to the system.
Security
Payroll systems are home to sensitive information like employee Social Security numbers and bank accounts. Look for a system with rules-based and role-based data access to ensure only those who need to see certain information have access. This also helps to prevent unauthorized changes and increases the accuracy of the data being used.
Lastly, ensure the software can generate custom reports for those ad-hoc requests that managers always seem to have. Having these custom reports saved in the payroll system can help reduce manual work by eliminating the need to build and save these spreadsheets each time.
Finally, a good payroll system should automate the calculating of federal, state, and local taxes and deductions from employees’ paychecks. This will not only reduce errors, but it will also streamline year-end reporting and filing. Additionally, the system should automatically send W-2s and 1099-MISC forms to the right agencies. These tax compliance features can eliminate manual steps and simplify the entire process for the company and its employees. This can also help the company comply with various tax regulations and avoid costly penalties and fines.