How to Overcome Critical Payroll Pain-Points in the Digital Era

Learn the best strategies to streamline payroll functions for your business with our new guide – Payroll in the Digital Era – Addressing Key Challenges in the Future of Workplace.

Key takeaways include:

• Discovering how workforce trends have impacted payroll capabilities
• Getting deep insights on optimising payroll processes and functions
• Ensuring operations are consistently updated with all regulations

Read now for even more insights!

Introduction

This payroll guide addresses common payroll challenges and how pivoting to an all-encompassing digital solution can resolve these issues. With the global economy recovering strongly, we see a new wave of human resource (HR) trends that may turn into long-term main-stays.

Undoubtedly, keeping employees engaged is now a top priority. However, with new working arrangements now being rolled out, new payroll challenges are also appearing. This includes addressing salary management with flexible working arrangements as well as skill-based focused engagement and growth opportunities to retain talent.

Technological advancement has allowed organisations to pivot towards online payroll systems, helping reduce the manual work required to manage salary and expense processes. As industries race to shift every aspect of their business model to be digital, the severe shortage of tech talent caused companies to take a hard look at key gaps:

Streamlining hybrid work arrangements > Managing headcount shortage > Up-skilling /re-skilling employees

It is clear that HR must quickly learn how these digital payroll solutions work to leverage all the benefits of this digital transformation. The changes will primarily focus on managing payroll more accurately and efficiently.

Read on to learn why many companies are still facing these payroll challenges and how to transform and streamline your payroll processes.

Executive Summary

In this guide, you’ll learn how to address these critical payroll challenges prevalent in Singapore and Malaysia. This includes managing large organisation payrolls and ensuring timely salary release. With cloud computing taking business functions to new levels of innovation, it has helped reduce the complications of payroll processes. Hence, a payroll system has the digital functions HR needs to manage salary and expense processes more efficiently.

Key takeaways:

1. Discover new trends that impact payroll capabilities
2. Learn how to best optimise payroll functions
3. Ensure consistent regulatory compliance

Top 3 Payroll Pain-Points

Before exploring the payroll challenges that HR professionals face, let’s first understand the changes in payroll trends across Asia. As is, many companies have shifted their focus towards employee engagement and already recognised the need to adopt flexible working arrangements.

Current major payroll challenges for Asia, specifically Malaysia and Singapore, include these focal points:

• Managing the payroll of a huge workforce
• Maintaining the accuracy of employees’ records
• Being compliant to statutory and legislative requirements

Payroll in the Digital Era

Managing staff data, salary processing, and ensuring timely pay-outs are major focuses for any business. This is to ensure payroll is always seamless and error-free. How does this translate to scaled-up operations; data consolidation/optimisation; managing unexpected errors; and basic legalities?

Managing and Scaling Payroll for Sizeable Groups of Employees

Businesses that manage a large amount of employee payroll can be overwhelmed at any given time. This is very true for HR departments that manually verify all employee data and information as accurate. This, among other challenges, pushed HR to coordinate with various departments within the organisation to ensure that all data are submitted correctly and timely.

Without an all-in-one software that can store and authenticate the data, this process will prove to be an uphill task for HR teams. This is more so when every step is done manually and, when necessary, must scale when operational expansion comes into play.

New processes, including computing variable costs – like performance bonuses and sales commissions for employees, being compliant with all data protection policies, and having the means to scale – must also be considered. As earnings can vary monthly, keeping track of these costs will become difficult. Worse, it can be time-consuming for HR to manually calculate these constantly changing elements every month.

Using the right payroll solution will allow HR quicker access, gain better tracking, and achieve smoother management of salaries for all employees. All this can be determined via variable payment categories, customised criteria, and taxation formulas.

Businesses can do all that and more, including active compliance management, automating basic processes, and ensuring maximum accuracy. This solution also offers localised support and customised training.

Without an all-in-one software that can store and authenticate the data, this process will prove to be an uphill task for HR.

Time-Consuming Configurations for In-house Payroll Systems

It’s a known fact that deploying payroll processing can be tedious. The time required to consolidate employee data, such as accumulated man-hours and calculating the fine details for salaries and deductions, can be better used on other tasks.

The input data is usually derived from multiple sources with in-house payroll systems. This process puts HR at risk of calculating employees’ salaries wrongly. Learning to use multiple payroll software and consolidating data from various entries require too much time and have been proven to be highly inefficient. While there may be savings due to lower cost options, one must consider the best use of HR resources when crunching and compiling from multiple sources on a monthly basis.

With the right technology, HR can conveniently retrieve employee data within one software, such as time and attendance, annual leave records, and the number of hours worked. All this and more can be achieved, which greatly helps reduce the time taken to summarise all data inputs and minimises any chance of errors.

Learning to use multiple payroll software and consolidating data from various entries require too much time and have been proven to be highly inefficient.

Miscalculating Employees’ Pay / Delayed Salary Release

Calculating employee pay and performance can be a logistical nightmare with all the data that needs to be tracked. This includes factors, such as off days and hours worked in a salary period. At the same time, human errors may slow down the entire process, leading to employees being underpaid or not paid on time. Such issues can have a detrimental effect on employee engagement.

Employees who are not paid correctly or on time will have their livelihoods impacted. Affected employees are unable to pay bills and other expenses, causing distress that ultimately, over time, demotivates them to work. Worse, they would be encouraged to seek new opportunities.

Human error in payroll > Underpaid or late salary release > Impacted livelihood

Human errors may slow down the entire process, leading to employees being underpaid or not paid on time.

Legal Compliance

All HR professionals know there is a laundry list of items to comply with based on each country’s legislation – from issuing employees the complete list of Key Employment Terms (KETs), to managing overtime work regulations, and statutory contributions. To further complicate matters, these critical factors are known to change periodically. The most recent example of such a scenario is the latest amendments to Malaysia’s Employment Act and planned increased contributions for Singapore’s Central Provident Fund (CPF). Both will come into effect from January 1 2023 and businesses that fail to comply will face regulatory action.

All HR professionals know there is a laundry list of items to comply with based on each country’s legislation.