Processing payroll is a function that touches the responsibilities of the HR and Finance departments, and depending on the organisation, either department could be placed in charge of it.
For payroll specialists, finance, and HR personnel who work in this capacity, here are some of the challenges faced as they do so.
Balancing payroll-related responsibilities with day-to-day operations
While the responsibility for running payroll could fall on the HR or finance department, manual payroll processing can be extremely time-consuming. If HR or finance only have time to crunch numbers and pore over spreadsheets every month, it could affect their ability for more strategic functions such as data analysis, projection, and planning to align individual units with organisational goals.
Compliance management
With the constantly changing landscape of payroll-related legislation, ensuring compliance is an equally evolving challenge faced by organisations today, especially with the heavy penalties attached to non-compliance.
Managing employee information and timesheets
Timesheets keep track of the number of hours employees have worked, factoring in overtime hours, leave, sick leave, and other relevant factors. This gets even more complicated when dealing with large organisations with many employees, different pay structures, or with offices in different locations. Accurately processing this with spreadsheets becomes incredibly burdensome.
Security and privacy
Payroll inevitably involves managing employee information. Working with complex spreadsheets could make security breaches more likely, opening a window for data mishandling, payroll fraud, and other issues that could be dangerous and costly for companies.
Correctly taxing benefits-in-kind
Benefits-in-kind have become perks with which organisations can attract the best talent. However, since the tax on benefits-in-kind sometimes varies from income tax, it can sometimes be challenging to tax and to identify the benefits with the most optimal cost for the company, especially in addition to calculating employee and employer taxes on income tax with the constantly changing payroll tax regulations.
Besides dealing with these challenges, organisations have to proactively set measures in place to combat other issues like payroll fraud, minimising human error, among others.
However, a simple solution to overcoming these challenges is automating the payroll process with a specialised payroll software like SeamlessPayroll.
SeamlessPayroll automatically computes everything on your payroll including salaries, bonuses, prorated payments, raises, deductions, pensions, taxes, benefits-in-kind, gross-up, net-to-gross computations, amortized accruals, and so much more. It also allows you to directly pay staff salaries and remit salary deposits from within the software.
Join other HR and finance professionals at the launch of SeamlessPayroll on Wednesday, November 11th, 2020 at a virtual event titled Compensation, Benefits, and Technology. It will feature conversations with acclaimed industry experts like Taiwo Oyedele, Fiscal Policy Partner, and West Africa Tax Leader at PwC.
Additionally, participants at the launch event will get generously discounted access to SeamlessPayroll. Interested? Register to attend the SeamlessPayroll launch here.
