How Can I Speed Up Payroll?

Does payroll drive you crazy? Integrating payroll and employee time and attendance eliminates payroll problems. It also makes life easier for your employees, managers, and HR team.

Today’s article is for organizations that have separate payroll and employee time and attendance systems.

What’s so bad about separate platforms?

If your systems are separate, you are duplicating work. And if someone is doing manual data entry, mistakes are sneaking through.

This was found on an online discussion board:

“Every 2 weeks, I run payroll for 200 employees. 39 of them are salaried, and about 50 of the hourly employees work in 24-hour programs. I copy each employee’s regular and OT hours from the software into an Excel spreadsheet. Without breaks or interruptions, this process would take about six hours. I’ve never done it in less than eight. It’s exhaustive and exhausting.” 

Why is manual entry a problem?

You need automated time tracking that syncs to payroll. It will also reduce mistakes in processing payroll and help you stay compliant. A biometric time clock synced to an advanced employee time and attendance system is the best way to go.

In the previous example, the payroll manager spends several hours entering employee time. The hours must match up with the correct employee. He could mistakenly enter an extra number, omit a digit, or transpose two digits.

Let’s see what happens when there is mistake. A conservative estimate of the error rate would be 2%. For 200 employees, that means four employees could get an incorrect paycheck. If you have two pay periods per month, this amounts to 96 incorrect paychecks annually.

Data entry problems are not isolated events…

If you pay your employees by the hour, your payroll is based on the hours entered. Either you short that employee or pay too much.

If the employee hours are wrong, the paycheck total is incorrect. If the paycheck has an incorrect amount, the FICA withholdings are wrong. This could be due to inaccurate clock ins or corruption during the manual import.

Using paper time cards provides more opportunity for error. An employee can enter an incorrect shift start time. The worker could do a math error when totaling hours. The manager who approves it could misread the handwriting.

If the employee hours aren’t correct, neither are accrual calculations. Employees might not earn vacation time or sick days that they are rightfully due.

Moving on. If the deductions are wrong, the employer portion of the taxes is wrong.

You are probably thinking: “What is a better way?”

Here’s how it works:

It all starts with tracking staff member time. Automating your time tracking to speed up payroll. A biometric time clock is the best way to ensure that punches are accurate. It’s virtually impossible to fake a biological identifier to buddy clock for another employee.

“What if I have mobile and offsite workers?”

If you have mobile associates, they will need another clock in method. TimeWorksMobile with GPS the geographic location when an employee clocks in on the web portal. This is not as fraud-proof as a biometric clock. But it beats taking their word for it.

It’s not just time theft that can mess up payroll…

A biometric clock and automated employee timekeeping lets you enforce schedules and set overtime alerts. Some biometric clocks have tools that present associates with logical prompts so they don’t make common punch mistakes. Make sure your time and attendance system has a mobile app for offsite punches.

MasterPay USA can help you speed up payroll. For more information, call us at 877-374-1665.

MasterPay USA offers WorkforceHUB, the unified Human Resources portal that makes it easy to optimize the performance of your supervisors, employees, and business.

WorkforceHUB includes TimeWorksPlus, TimeSimplicity, and TimeWorksMobile. We’ve just added onboarding, benefits enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement! WorkforceHUB is designed for busy employers like you who need to streamline scheduling, automate time and attendance tracking, maintain regulatory compliance, and reduce labor costs.

How much can you save? Check our MasterPay USA ROI Calculator.

We can get you up and running with WorkforceHUB in minutes. Contact us today to schedule a demo.