While we all know the importance of payroll to every business, managing it comes with its challenges that can be unique to the organisation or its industry.
Some payroll challenges faced by small and medium-sized businesses include dealing with manual payroll processing, keeping up with regulatory changes, managing tax compliance, payroll errors and several other issues.
To experience a hitch-free payroll run, here are a few practices that small and medium-sized businesses should engage in:
1. Prepare Payroll Early
Regardless of your business’s size, workers need to be paid their wages/salaries on time. Failure to pay employees when due can result in disengaged staff and lowered productivity, all of which ultimately hurts your business.
If you prepare payroll manually, set a calendar reminder to prompt you to begin your payroll processing early enough to meet up with payday.
2. Maintain Records
Keeping financial data is essential not just because it can help your business make informed decisions and projections for the future, but also to help your company prove compliance in the event of external audits and other such reviews.
3. Keep Up With Regulatory Changes
Laws and payroll-related regulations continue to change and adapt to the ever-evolving business landscape. Suppose your business is not aware of regulatory changes that can affect income, tax, or any other statutory deduction. In that case, it means that your business will likely be incorrectly calculating tax (or any affected payment), and can face legal issues or hefty fines for non-compliance.
Fortunately, with a good payroll management software, you can automate your statutory deductions, as the systems are constantly updated to keep up with the changing regulatory climate.
Read: Factors To Consider When Choosing A Performance Management Software
4. Keep Data Security a Top Priority
Payroll and related employee information are sensitive data that must be securely maintained. Do your best to eliminate a paper trail and ensure that only authorised personnel can access payroll-related information. This will help to curtail things like payroll fraud and protect the personal data your employees’ have trusted to your safekeeping.
5. Get Professional Expertise
If you’re the owner of a small or medium-sized organisation, manually preparing payroll can be quite confusing, especially when you don’t have the needed professional experience. It’s alright to hire a payroll manager or consistently seek advice from payroll specialists.
6. Use Technology Solutions
Automating the payroll of your business with a payroll management software is one of the accepted payroll best practices your business should be engaging in. This will help you ensure that your business is compliant and that your time is freed up to tackle more strategic functions.
With a payroll management software like SeamlessPayroll, your business can stay compliant by automating salary payment and statutory deductions, avoid payroll errors like overpaying or underpaying staff, and generally take the headache from payroll processing.
With SeamlessPayroll, your payroll data is secure on a cloud-based system that allows you to control admin access and define your own payroll approval workflow.
Learn more about SeamlessPayroll here.
