You must be having difficulties managing your company’s payroll. Be it classifying employees, making timely payments, working out hours and overtime, reporting all forms of taxable income, or keeping an organized record, each of them demands a systematic approach.
But it’s not a breeze to do so, especially, if you own a medium to large-sized company. Additionally, if your payroll management is manually operated, errors are likely to happen. In such a case, what can come to your rescue is payroll software.
But surely, you can’t implement payment software out of the blue. You have to make your company ready to embrace the automation tool. And that’s exactly what I will be dilating in this write-up.
10 Steps to Implement Payroll Software in Your Organization:
Implementing payroll software or system in a company isn’t a walk in the park. It’s not that you abruptly think about implementing payroll software in your organization, you then make the purchase, and it’s done and dusted.
In fact, you have to invest ample time to find good and reliable payroll software. Let me share with you the 10 steps to implement payroll software in your company —
Research to Find the Best Payroll Software:
The first and foremost job to implement payroll software in your organization is carrying out holistic research. If you delve into different payroll software developed by various software companies, you will discover that all of them aren’t worth considering.
Many of them are substandard, some of them are unsuitable for your organization, while others may be fancy, exceeding your budget. So, research is key! Your research should be based on your internal needs, the vendor’s reputation and support system, and of course, your budget.
Figure out Internal Needs:
Talking about internal needs, you should ask yourself a series of relevant questions. Why do you want to install a payroll system in your organization? Is it just to upgrade to a new and advanced system or do you want to get rid of employee payment issues?
Ask yourself if you are struggling to maintain records and paperwork of new hires and process their compensation and benefits packages. Whatever may be the reasons, you have to dive deep and figure out your internal requirements.
Explore the Targeted Vendor:
Once done with it, you can start exploring your targeted vendor. And these days it’s a piece of cake to research your vendor. Just head over to prominent review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot to know about their reliability, trustworthiness, and support systems.
If possible, you can also contact a few customers of your targeted vendor. Their words and reviews will help you to make a decision as well. And don’t forget to refer to Glassdoor to know about their atmosphere, culture, and also how they treat their employees.
Don’t Overlook Client Support:
Quality client support is crucial before choosing your payroll vendor. This is because glitches are likely to occur in payroll like miskeying pay rates or hours, missing the processing deadline due to an emergency, or any other technical error.
In such cases, it’s important how quickly and promptly the support team responds and resolves the issue. Whether they contact you through emails or phone calls.
It’s also salient if they take the bulk of responsibilities while onboarding you with their system. If they just provide you with future dates for the system implementation instead of doing it for you, they should be overlooked.
Ask Relevant Questions as per Your Budget:
Your company’s budget to implement payroll software is crucial. If you can’t afford a particular payroll system even if it serves high quality, smashing features, and other key benefits, it won’t work for you. So, be bold enough to ask necessary questions to your vendor.
What are their different pricing plans based on the features & benefits of the payroll system? Are there any upfront fees or set-up fees? And what sorts of issues if occurs, they will cover? Also, don’t forget to ask how often they raise their subscription fees.
Establish a Realistic Implementation Timeline:
You are done selecting your vendor. Now, it’s time to plan the payroll system implementation schedule. Once you know that your organization will have a payroll system, it’s tempting to go live as soon as possible.
But don’t hasten! Take your time and plan when it will be the best time to implement the system. Ideally, the beginning of a financial year or quarter makes accounts and data integration easier.
This will provide you with an abundance of time to get introduced to the system and its process. You can test the system, validate data, and also train your employees, so they find using the software cakewalk.
Be sure to Integrate Other Systems with the Payroll Software:
The payroll software should be able to integrate other systems like accounting, finance, time & attendance, and scheduling. Generally, payroll software boasts the function to integrate with other systems, whether built-in or as an addon. Still, double-check the one you are going to implement.
If these systems require any updates or changes, make sure to execute that before the implementation. This is because these factors can cause delays in testing & implementation and will demand repeat actions.
Additionally, make sure to sync employee IDs, departments, and position codes across the payroll system. All these integrations will make payment processing easier and more efficient.
Focus on Training Your Staff:
There isn’t any alternative to training employees when it comes to familiarizing themselves with a new system like payroll software. This will make employee adaptation to the system easier and they will be comfortable dealing with it.
To train your staff, consider the below-listed points —
- Train your HR and payroll officials as well as manager through your vendor experts
- Record new business processes and new terms as a way to help employees complete their system tasks without pinging or calling you or the project manager
- Don’t forget to train each employee on key functionalities like checking pay stubs, viewing leave balances, printing W-2s, etc.
- Prepare reports for management, so they can take full advantage of the system data
Bear in mind that the involvement of upper management and payroll employees is key to implementing a payroll system in your organization. Upper management plays a crucial role in mobilizing resources from different departments.
While the payroll staff is responsible for validating accuracy in the system. They are also needed for parallel runs of your new system and legacy system for a smooth transition.
Examine Your Payroll System:
Testing your payroll system is imperative as it can yield multiple issues during the implementation phase. Your software may look intuitive and also user-friendly. But that shouldn’t convince you that the system is flawless.
There could be many underlying issues like incorrect configuration that may mess up your payroll employee data errors. To avoid incurring massive losses, wasted time, energy, and electricity, make sure to test your payroll system to the core.
It’s overly important that your payroll system functions properly and produces correct payroll data both now and in the future. With correct payroll data and smooth payroll processing, your system is likely to notch up operational efficiency.
Go Live and Keep Regular Data Reviews on:
Once the testing is done, it’s time to go live with your new payroll system. Smoothen all the payroll tasks of your organization with the payroll software and let your employees experience its key features.
But that’s not over! You have to periodically review your payroll system. You might have successfully implemented the system. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t encounter any issues. Technical glitches and data inconsistencies are likely to happen, especially, if your company is growing.
Regular data reviews, maybe, once a quarter is an ideal review frequency that you can adopt to fix system issues incurred throughout the year.
What’s Your Take:
Steps to implement payroll software is an uphill task. But the fruit you will get by implementing the system is sweet. Not only you will enjoy automation in your payroll system but also your employees will have a hassle-free payroll system.
I have walked you through the easiest steps to implement payroll software in this write-up. Now, the ball is in your court! Get rid of the paperwork in your existing manual payroll system and integrate cutting-edge technology into your company’s payroll system to facilitate all the payroll stuff.
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