Small business owners, especially those just starting out, are often looking for ways to make the most of their company’s resources. When resources are limited, every little improvement to increase productivity helps, even if the change seems insignificant at first. One of the most overlooked areas where a business stands to benefit is within the payroll solutions department. It’s not just the number of employees and the rate of pay, but the way that companies choose to approach payroll that can provide an array of positive changes.
Paperless Payroll
It doesn’t seem like a massive investment when viewed as monthly or bi-monthly installments, but printing and cutting physical paychecks can end up costing a company significantly. Think about it. Depending on how many employees you have working under you and the current pay schedule your company uses, you are likely investing hundreds of dollars per month in paper and ink.
Choosing a paperless payroll solutions approach not only saves the company time and money that would ordinarily be invested in physical paychecks, but also helps your company decrease its carbon footprint. The majority of customers value companies that care about the environment, and other companies admire business owners who embrace innovation.
Synchronize Pay Cycles
Companies hire many different types of workers to fill a range of different roles, from part-time to full-time, as well as contractors, freelancers, and interns. Because of this, not all employees are always paid via the same method. Having several pay schedules creates more work for your company’s payroll department. This means more time spent calculating totals, double-checking pay sheets, producing paper checks or sending direct deposits.
Using a single pay schedule for all of your employees can reduce your risk of coming across payroll computing errors or duplicate payments, as well as simplifying the entire process and saving labor hours wasted with complicated systems.
Frequent Audits
The best way to solve a problem is to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Rather than waiting until something goes wrong in your payroll department or collecting a certain number of employee complaints, take it upon yourself to check processes regularly. Schedule monthly or quarterly audits so you can personally test your payroll software, check out time- management analyses, and determine exactly how your staff is approaching payroll each period. Staying on top of business practices and tackling small problems as they arise will help ensure compliance and reduce the risk of encountering severe issues in the future.
Involve Your Employees
Occasionally, an employee will raise an issue with payroll that has nothing to do with processing mistakes; rather, it is the result of miscommunication between employer and employee. The payroll process can be complicated, and employees might be unaware of how they’re classified as workers, how their salaries are calculated, or other company-wide procedures. Because of this, an employee may report a payroll error where one does not exist, which leads to investigating through work hours that did not need to be expended.
Making your employees aware of how your company’s payroll department operates will not only reduce the frequency of false error reports but also open the line of communication between you and your staff. If you allow payroll questions, host staff meetings to address issues, and adopt an open-door policy, your employees will be more open to asking questions about an issue and getting clarification before reporting something they don’t understand as a legitimate error.
Payroll can be a very complicated but necessary process in small- to medium-sized businesses. Adopting more efficient practices can significantly aid in reducing work hours for your payroll department. Streamlining ordinarily complicated processes will not only free your employees to take on more rewarding work, but also increase your workers’ productivity and decrease the time and labor your current processes waste.
