Finance & Accounting

What Are Some Tips to Improve Payroll Process Efficiency?

It is important to get the payroll right. Companies make mistakes everywhere, which can lead to high costs. The government can impose a lot of taxes on your business if you get some kind of detail or amount wrong on the payroll. Unfortunately, there can be a lot of issues with calculating the payroll. One possible reason for this is the attempt to carry out this important task in a great hurry. So if you want to reduce costs in your business, then you may want to spend the extra time to improve payroll efficiency services.

It is clear that payroll costs a lot of time to companies. Namely, studies have found that as much as a quarter of payroll and accounting bookkeepers spend more than half of each working day on these jobs. However, attempts to settle the payroll quickly can lead to mistakes that can cost the business money.

How can you speed up your payroll without making costly mistakes? The answer is to make work more efficient. Here are some of the best ways to save time and money.

Performing payroll properly can save a lot of time, while any mistake or hassle could cost your business a lot of time and money. Here are some tips you can use to improve efficiency without making mistakes.

Try Outsourcing Payroll Management

It is true that external suppliers and service providers often make a major contribution to the success of a company. However, it is not necessary to outsource all activities, such as your accounting or payroll activities. It makes more sense to better utilize your own capacities as already mentioned. At least certain sections should remain in the company if it allows the internal, temporal organization. If you want to make your whole payroll processes way more efficient and cost-effective, then finding an external service provider for your management could be a good idea.

While there are advantages to keeping your payroll centralized, many companies find themselves in an undesirable situation for that very reason. This is especially true in times of corporate mergers in which companies branch out into different locations and are increasingly dependent on freelance employees.

Make Payroll Services Simpler and Reduce Complexity

Does your company have dozens of different job levels, health plans, benefits packages, etc.? If so, this could contribute to the problem. For example, research conducted by one major business organization has found that the most efficient human resources departments have fewer occupations compared to the rest of the departments.

It may be a good idea to reduce the complexity of all of your payroll calculations. Simplifying everything can make the calculation of the payroll way faster and easier. Not to mention a simpler process for the payroll can also reduce the number of mistakes that are potentially made. So try and keep your whole process as simple as you can, or avoid complexity altogether when it comes to your payroll.

By reducing complexity in this way, they further optimize the payroll department and reduce the time spent on each job. If there are salary groups and job descriptions that could be put into a pay grade, this would easily save you time. And it could also save the time of your bookkeepers within your company as well.

Always Update Your Payroll Processes

After all, make sure you never think your payroll system is “fixed.” Sooner or later, when new processes become necessary, they eventually become inefficient again, unless you try to adapt and improve constantly.

Try Going Paperless

Payrolls traditionally include huge file cabinets full of printed documents. However, this is an incredibly inefficient way to get things done and can cost a business a lot of money. One study has shown that a single misplaced or lost document can cost a company hundreds of dollars in loss.

On the other hand, losing a document can cost a business several hundreds of dollars, which is just a huge waste in cost. You might think that this will not happen to you, but on average, large companies are posting hundreds of documents every day. And even smaller companies are handling dozens of paper documents daily as well. That will just naturally increase the chances of accidentally losing one document in your company’s files. This is a huge waste of time and ensuring that all documents are in one computer system can massively increase efficiency.

If you go paperless and focus on digital financial records then you can ensure that all of your documents are going to be as safe as possible. It is way harder to lose a digital file or document. Plus, it is also much easier to organize a digital file as well.

You can also try to move all of your digital documents to cloud storage, to ensure that it stays even safer. The reason is simple in most cases. Two-thirds of companies believe that this will reduce their manual labor and experience with the cloud has suggested that this is indeed the case. This is an easy way to increase efficiency, and while the setup may be time-consuming initially, it can save a lot of time in the longer run. And if you store your financial documents in the cloud, then it is really easy to back up any sort of sensitive file as well.

Have A Chain of Command or Responsibility in Payroll Processing

Payroll errors cost working time. One of the biggest problems is chasing after what has happened and finding solutions; this only gets worse if the best course of action in this area is not clearly defined. If an error occurs, the responsible person must know exactly where to report it and what action needs to be taken.

To achieve this, it is best to build a chain of responsibility. Employees and executives need to know their payroll duties. You can also work towards providing more transparency in your payroll services. This is because if your whole process is more transparent then it becomes much easier to handle any sort of complaints or inquiries made by any of your employees.