3 Must-Haves For Your e-HR Bundle
Human resources (HR) is responsible for managing the entire employee lifecycle – recruitment, onboarding, payroll, benefits administration, employee relations and so on. But how does HR really spend their time?
According to an infographic published by totaljobs, the largest proportion of HR’s time (around 21.8%) is spent meeting with senior staff and business partners. Administrative and operational matters constitute a total of 17% of HR time and recruitment and employee relations make up the bulk of HR’s time. This leaves a small fraction of time (around 12.5%) for HR to focus on strategic matters.
While there are many day-to-day tasks that HR focuses on. There are many expectations and pressures that the modern HR team faces today. This demands innovative methods and information technology to manage the administrative and mundane aspects of HR in order for them to focus on designing HR strategies to adapt to the increasingly complex and mobile talent pool today.
With the plethora of HR tools and software available in the market today, each designed to enhance a specific vertical within HR, it is not surprising for the HR department to immediately jump on the bandwagon. There are no doubt plenty of benefits that technology tools can bring about to HR processes – cost savings, automation, increased efficiency, and shorter turnaround time of employees requests. Aside from the operational efficiencies, information technology acts as a bridge to link HR with other business functions such as Finance and Employee Relations. This helps to further boost the overall business management across various business functions.
The most common type of HR technology that organisations invest in is Human Resource Information System (HRIS). Reason being is that the HRIS often acts as the central data repository where key employee and payroll records are stored, feeding key details into other platform modules such as payroll, leave management, and even recruitment. Whether you are a new startup looking to deployed a new HRIS or doing an annual review of your existing HRIS, here are 3 must-have features in your HRIS – also known as the eHR bundle:
eTimesheet
eTimesheet allows employees to key in their daily working hours into the HR system without having to fill in hardcopy timesheets. This is particularly handy for organisations with large headcounts of hourly-paid or temporary personnel. Online attendance tracking via eTimesheets means that employers, supervisors, and HR do not have to worry about losing hardcopy timesheets or inaccurate attendance tracking. Proper timesheet record management also means that HR is able to compute employees’ salaries accurately and ensure timely disbursement.
eLeave
Similar to eTimesheets, online leave applications make it extremely convenient for employees to submit their leave applications anywhere, anytime. This allows HR and supervisors to easily manage and track employees’ leave applications and balances with minimal administration and paperwork. Leave applications submitted by employees will also automatically be routed to their supervisors for approval, ensuring quick turnaround. With the ease of leave applications and oversight on leave applications that HR and supervisors have, this allows managers to effectively plan their resource allocation, particularly for projects or urgent work tasks.
eClaim
Manual claims submissions and reimbursement have traditionally been a messy and administrative affair. With an online claims platform, employees can easily submit their claims by uploading a photo for approval. Upon approval by either HR, their direct manager or both, the claim submission automatically gets routed into the current payday cycle. This ensures that claims are quickly reimbursed to employees without the long waiting times of approval and payment. Concurrently, most claims platforms also allow employees to classify the type of claims submitted, which helps HR identify claims that are taxable or not.
On top of the streamlined processes and efficiency that a bundled eHR brings about. It also brings about effective management practices. With this network of platforms to connect key employee information together, it helps to boost the business management needs of HR while driving high employee engagement levels.
Improving Your Payroll Process in 7 Steps
Payroll is a highly critical business function in any organisation. One wrong calculation or a slightly delayed salary disbursement may result in unhappiness ensuing amongst employees. When payroll mistakes happen on a recurring basis, this causes employees to feel financially insecure in the organisation’s financials. This may result in low employee engagement levels and high turnover rates.
Despite payroll being one of the most critical business functions, it is a time-consuming and repetitive process. In-house payroll processing demands high levels of attention to detail. As headcount increases, that demand increases in parallel.
CONSOLIDATE YOUR CHANGES IN YOUR EMPLOYEE DATA
Employee data needs to be updated on a regular basis to ensure accurate payroll calculation. Items such as change in bank account number, employee address, or even inclusion of dependents, needs to be tracked and updated into your HR management system.
PLAN A PAYROLL SCHEDULE
Have a fixed payday schedule so that employees can expect to receive their salaries on that particular day. On the payroll team’s end, it allows you to work backwards and plan for your payroll processing timeline.
CALCULATE EMPLOYEES’ SALARIES, INCLUDING ANY ALLOWANCES OR DEDUCTIONS
Run the calculations for your employees’ salaries, taking into account their salary payment type – be it weekly or monthly. Ensure that you include any allowances such as transportation allowance, meal allowances, or overtime.
DISBURSE SALARY PAYMENTS TO EMPLOYEES ON PAYDAY
Depending on whether salaries are directly credited into employees’ bank accounts or issued as paper checks, always factor in a couple of additional days should there be any delay in payroll processing. If your payroll team uses direct bank deposit. Ensuring that there are sufficient funds in the organisation’s corporate accounts before disbursing salary to employees.
ISSUE PAYSLIPS TO EMPLOYEES
Electronic payslips are commonly provided to employees via email or accessible through the employee self-service portal. However, you may need to print out hardcopy payslips for employees. Who do not have access to a computer, such as drivers or manual labour workers.
SUBMIT STATUTORY FILINGS TO THE RESPECTIVE GOVERNMENT BODIES
Depending on whether you are processing payroll for a single country or a region. You may have to submit different tax filings to various government bodies. Make sure that employees are classified correctly in order to ensure correct tax contributions or withholdings with the respective statutory board.
CLOSING OF PAYROLL FOR THE MONTH
Once you have completed processing payroll for the particular month, it is time to do some proper record-keeping. Processing payroll is no easy feat. If you find that your HR team is struggling and lack the relevant payroll expertise. It may be advisable to outsource your payroll to a third-party payroll vendor. These external payroll vendors specialise in payroll services and expertise. Which helps to take the stress out of payroll processing and its complexities.
Most of these payroll vendors also provide a suite of HR-related software services to complement the existing payroll services. This may include leave management software or expenses management software. Some may even integrate their payroll software services with your existing HRIS. To facilitate seamless transfer for employee data for payroll processing purposes.
Besides being a complex business function. Payroll is one of those business functions that is at high risk of fraud and embezzlement.. There should be a limited number of users that have access to these payroll records. If you have engaged an external payroll provider. The majority of these third-party payroll vendors protect and store your organisation’s payroll data on encrypted cloud-based platforms. This helps to provide an additional layer of security on your payroll records.
