Outsourcing your payroll takes a costly, time consuming process and eliminates it from your day to day operations. How much more time and money could you save if you changed your time and attendance system too?
This week, around 1,300 health workers in Belfast found their latest payslip was missing significant chunks of the money they’d been expecting. An error in processing bank holiday payments had meant that shifts worked between Christmas Day and December 28th won’t now be paid until February.
How did this happen? The problem, it appears, is that manual adjustments weren’t made in time to meet this month’s deadline. Whenever this sort of problem arises, you can bet serious money that the explanation will, sooner or later, always land at the door of ‘manual adjustments’. And no business process requires more manual adjustments than the paper timesheet.
The problem of automating?
Across the UK there are thousands of businesses still using manual timesheets. Ask them why, and they’ll probably tell you one of the following:
- We don’t have the budget for an automated time and attendance system
- Our people aren’t very computer-literate and an automated T&A system would be confusing
- We’ve talked about it but our staff say they’ll feel as though they’re being ‘watched’
Leaving aside the responses to each of those (the simplest of which is that many similar businesses have made the switch, overcoming each obstacle with relative ease), there’s a bigger problem. Manual timesheets inherently mean error. They mean missed entries and unrecorded appointments. They make time theft, oversights and simple forgetfulness easy, and managing the problem difficult.
And even if your timesheets are a pristine work of precision and accuracy, you’ll still risk all the double keying and human error that creeps in when it’s time to get the information onto your payroll system.
Making your payroll better
If your business is investing in payroll software, or outsourcing its payroll, then the better the information you feed it, the better the outcome will be. An automated time and attendance system captures and collates all the information your payroll system needs with far less chance of human error creeping in.
In addition to the many other benefits it can bring (like tracking absenteeism, monitoring punctuality and helping you meet Working Time Directives) it supports your payroll, or your payroll provider, rather than making life more difficult for them.
So you don’t pay for time that isn’t worked.
You don’t miss payments.
You don’t waste time and money managing a paper system.
And the chances of problems arising because of those dreaded ‘manual adjustments’ are much reduced.
You can find out more about time and attendance with Just Payroll Services here.