Payroll is an important part of every business and getting it right is vital to better profitability and success. Every business will have different processes but there are a couple of areas that trade services will be familiar with and we have put together some tips to improve accuracy and efficiency in your payroll processing across Xero and simPRO.
Getting the Actual Cost of Employees Right
An employee only costs what wage or salary is paid to them, right? Wrong! There are a number of costs that need to be calculated that are not always front of mind like:
- Superannuation
- Insurance
- Industry training
These are just some of the overheads that a single employee attracts.
simPRO has a great employee overhead calculation tool that you should review at least every six months. This is a relatively straightforward process and is an integral part of not only payroll but also getting accurate reporting across your business.
Getting the cost of your employees right will give you confidence that your labour costs are being covered when charged out.
Complete Schedules
Using your scheduling effectively in simPRO will not only improve the accuracy of your payroll, but also the accuracy of your job reporting. Most companies will take their payroll data from schedules so it’s a good idea to have processes in place to ensure technicians put their times against the correct jobs and a supervisor or project manager closes it off each week.
To ensure this is being done properly, you can do things like:
- Set a notification on payroll day
- Send it to those responsible to review the schedules
- Mark them as complete.
You might also want to do it as a company wide initiative and offer rewards like staff lunches or other incentives to ensure timesheets are done correctly. After all, the cost of a company lunch may be much cheaper than spending hours each week contacting staff and supervisors to confirm what hours have been worked on any given day. Not to mention the stress from wondering if your jobs are profitable and if you have charged enough to cover your business costs.
Faster Processing of Payroll for Larger Businesses
Businesses with only a few employees may not see the benefit of better payroll processes but what if you have 50 staff or more to process? simPRO offers a direct timesheet integration to Xero for payroll which can be effective but with simPRO’s BI Reporting there are now other options for larger businesses to run their payroll. Products like Employment Hero (formerly KeyPay) have a number of HR and payroll benefits that make payroll processing for larger businesses much easier as well as offering HR functions to manage things like:
- New employee onboarding
- Qualification renewals
- Payroll award management
You can also use simPRO’s BI reporting function to export the weekly timesheets and then import these to Employment Hero. Rather than manually calculate award rates, hours logged, leave accrual and other payroll aspects, this data can be captured and calculated in bulk form saving hours of processing time.
Most clients who find payroll processing a nightmare will likely have overlooked some of the key areas mentioned above. Their timesheets are incomplete, the schedules have not been fully booked out, or the actual cost of employees have not been considered and calculated correctly. If you would like some assistance with streamlining payroll or more info on BI Reporting and using Employment Hero, call us on 1300 446 956 or fill in your details here and we will contact you.
