Every time there is a discussion on payroll management systems, organizations mandate that payroll must be accurate and that your employees should be paid on time with every payroll and compliance considerations possible. This should always be the case but, organizations are now waking up to a third dimension in successful payroll management – “Transparent Payroll”.
What does a transparent Payroll management software mean?
Transparency in payroll means every stakeholder from senior management to the last level employee, have a clear understanding of how their organization handles payroll, what compliance considerations are taken into account, and finally how they will get their salary at the end of the month. For this to happen, it requires complete visibility of data and facts to all involved. The next-gen cloud payroll management software like PeopleStrong Payroll with insights and analytics abilities does complete justice to this third dimension.
What does transparency mean to payroll managers?
The payroll managers who are working day in & day out on processing payroll have just one aim – delivering consistent payroll experience for their colleagues. Transparency helps them take quick decisions and keep the employees informed. It also means lesser queries about why they did not receive their full salaries!
How to build a transparent payroll management system?
Base Payroll Mechanism
The basis of a comprehensive payroll management system lies in its integration of multiple systems so that the salary can be disbursed on the last working day of the month or last working day minus one. To do this, the data from leave and attendance needs to come a week before the end of the month, i.e. 25th of every month. Data inputs from sources such as Investments, reimbursements, and claims, change in CTC / Salary Structure, LOPR Arrears, and many more are needed timely. While the pay cycle completes at the end of the month i.e. 1st to 30th/31st of the month, an integrated payroll system gathers data points from different systems and can process salaries seamlessly.
Managing Payroll Calculations
A comprehensive payroll management software involves numerous configurations, structures, adherence, and compliances to provide a well-calculated salary at the end of the month. The entire calculations can be simply categorized under the following categories –
- Payable days
- Overtime
- Holidays
- Leave with Pay
- Change in CTC / Salary Structures
- Retrospective Arrear calculations
- One- time payment like performance incentives
- TDS, PF, ESI, LWF, PT Calculation as per the statutory law
Payroll Data and Reporting
The advent of data analytics and reporting have pushed organizations towards a more inference and visualization-based approach, bringing in a higher level of transparency in decision-making processes. The new normal of payroll management requires a system that delivers beyond timely salaries and provides detailed information to the user on various levels such as- company level, cost center level, department level, etc, till the last level i.e. an employee has been reached.
Payroll Audits
An end to end payroll management system like PeopleStrong payroll takes this dimension very seriously as the focus is on providing a detailed audit trail to the user so that the user can comprehend pre-payroll activities, the actual payroll management and finally how payroll will shape up. Once this step is followed and done correctly 70% of the payroll is completed even without processing.
Payroll Query Mechanism
Imagine a new payroll manager logging into the system for the first time and fiddling around various configurations of the payroll system. There may be hundreds of questions in his mind that cannot be taught in any knowledge transfer sessions. For these and many other scenarios, an establishment of a query mechanism engine that is self-explanatory, time-saving, and most importantly transparent is the need of the hour. PeopleStrong Payroll created just the perfect solution for this by the name “Ask Me” – an inbuilt payroll processing community where the user can virtually ask anything from the payroll system such as earnings, arrears, calculations, exemptions, Perquisites, Loans & Advances Statutory viz TDS, PF, ESI, PT, LWF and much more.
Leveraging AI in Payroll
We believe very strongly that a payroll system should speak to the users and vice versa. Our internal AI Chatbot Jinie adds up infinite possibilities to boost a transparent payroll delivering directly into the hands of the end-user. The functionalities include –
– An unparalleled reimbursement filing experience to every employee across the organization.
– Uploading a range of documents for verification. With Jinie’s parsing mechanism, reimbursement is just a snapshot away.
– A very detailed and comprehensive payslip which also contains a distinct message for each employee based on the calculations done for that employee.
– Our Chatbot Jinie which talks to the employees and answers payroll queries within spilled seconds.
The way forward
Accuracy and on-time salary processing are two must-haves for any payroll management system but the New Normal calls for the incorporation of the third dimension too i.e. “Transparency”.
At PeopleStrong, our purpose is to be able to understand and help end-users, especially in today’s remote working environment. We feel immense pleasure when our customers witness improvement in productivity by 60% and understand our approach of transparent payroll in small activities like pay slips layouts, query mechanism, payroll reports. This third dimension of Transparency has helped us bring smiles to many users and has helped increase their productivity.
