Now more than ever is a time where organisations of all sizes need to ensure that people are paid on time to ensure the trust is maintained and to keep motivation running high during this challenging time. The ongoing situation with Covid-19 has presented new challenges globally.
Overnight organisations needed to adapt to keep up with the changes and with these changes the priority & the interest of the team are important. As we know, payroll is one of the most important parts of any organization. Behind the wheels that keep an organisation turning, payroll is more often forgotten until pay day. However it is critical to keep payroll running as efficiently as possible, even more so in times of global crises like the one we are facing right now.
But can you operate your payroll remotely? Will your HR and payroll team be able to access systems and data from home? And while your HR and Payroll team may lack the time to keep up with the constant statutory changes, you still expect high-quality reports and that deadlines are kept. Your core business and confidentiality is extremely important at this time.
Here are some of the best practices to help you through this.
- Ensure you have access to reporting and continued payment and filing of required taxes.
- Make sure you can run payroll anywhere.
- Ease the pain and potential disruption by establishing a well-documented SOP.
- Capture all data and communication and ensure it is in an easily accessible cloud
If you have not fully digitized your global payroll the current crisis should give your organization the reason to do so as quickly as possible. With this comes changes to the statutory rules & regulations. Payroll will need to effectively reflect the new rules in their payroll calculations. In some cases, manual overrides of the system in use may be necessary to properly account for the new rules.
With all these changes, organisations must maintain clear & constant communication with their team especially with SOP updates. Mitigating the risks of late payroll or non-payment needs to be a priority. If any delays are expected to payroll, this needs to be flagged clearly and early.
The focus right now is to get the job done. Payroll professionals around the world are strategically solving a broad range of challenges to ensure that payroll is delivered on time. With teams working from different locations this can prove to be challenging and somewhat impossible. Payroll professionals have been forced to accept that technology is now not only allowing payroll to be done on time but it could be an opportunity to introduce a change that will have long term benefits.
At Propay Partners. We are constantly updating our Clients and listening to their concerns and learning about how they are adapting to the new normal. We are constantly updating our website with information and helpful advice to Clients who are understandably a bit nervous right now. We have set up a rapid response email that allows us to quickly respond to any queries they might have. onboard a payroll function to our platform and get them using are flexible technology quickly.
To summarize we are living in uncomfortable times. We must ensure we are prepared with potential contingencies and risks so we can mitigate the impact of the crisis on our daily lives. For payroll, organisations that have yet to digitalize their payroll process and standardize their document and data management in a secure cloud-based environment, the current crisis should be an evident reminder to do so immediately and of things to come in the future.
