Guide to Payroll Software and How It Works

Payroll is an essential component of any business’s operations. It is not only responsible for employee salary compensation, but it also plays an important role in a company’s protection by ensuring compliance with tax legislation. However, if you do payroll manually, HR staff will spend a considerable amount of time tracking down information such as pay rate, employee data, and so on. This process may soon become messy, as you might imagine. Most business owners find ways to avoid payroll by either setting up an in-house payroll system or outsourcing payroll to a third party. 

A payroll software enables you to focus on more important aspects of the organization by reducing time and effort spent on payroll. It is used to keep track of working hours, calculate earnings, withhold tax and other deductions, print and provide checks, and pay public labor tax. Payroll software is often utilized and requires minimal input from employers. Employers are intended to input wages as well as working hours and the software automatically calculates and deducts withholdings based on this information.

But how can a payroll software benefit your business? The information below can provide you with more in-depth answers.

What are the stages of manual payroll processing? 

Generally, the payroll process may be broken down into eight main steps for most companies: 

• Identify your payroll system 
• Create a payroll strategy 
• Gather information from employees 
• Establish direct deposit 
• Construct the system of time tracking 
• Check Staff Timetables  
• Authorize and provide payroll 
• Generate and preserve records on payroll 

As you can see, there are more stages to handling payroll than you may think. With payroll management software, your company is allowed to continue handling its own payroll processes while automating the time-consuming aspects. Payroll software is slightly more expensive than processing it by hand, but the extra cost will be worth it in terms of decreased errors, risks, time, and resources.

What are the benefits of a payroll software system instead of running a manual payroll system? 

When HR departments choose to do payroll manually, more time is consumed. Although it’s cost-effective, it requires staff to master payroll and tax legislations and may cause many errors. There’s also a lengthy learning curve for this work. 

HR employees will also have to spend substantial effort managing pay rate and retaining information, employee data and more. After they get that information, they may use pay rates, including any overtime or other financial benefits workers receive to determine earnings. Ultimately, they will deduct tax withholdings, distribute checks, and direct deposits to workers. 
On the other hand, with payroll software, you only need to add information about businesses and staff, enabling your staff to monitor their time using online software, empowering the system to manage payroll automatically and deliver their salary. Some prominent advantages of using payroll software are listed below.

Tax compliance 
Calculating tax withholding is one of the most challenging components of the payroll processing. Failing to meet deadlines can result in costly fines and penalties. Payroll software systems give information regarding compliance requirements as well as reminders. The software is updated on a regular basis to ensure that businesses have the most up-to-date information on changes in tax laws and other requirements. 

Mistakes reduction 
All kinds of human errors might arise when you perform your payroll manually. These mistakes might lead to employee discontent or tax violations. Meanwhile, payroll software can execute complex calculations quickly, saving you time and reducing the possibility of human error. Several payroll companies even provide penalty protection in the event of tax penalties. 

Employee Satisfaction 
A crucial aspect of keeping staff pleased is to pay them on schedule. Late and erroneous payments will cause your staff to worry about the company’s financial viability. This may damage your company’s general climate and culture, resulting in employees being negatively affected while performing their duties and leading to underperformance. A payroll software can send out reminders when it’s time to do payroll.  It also can help simplify and automate the direct deposit procedure, making the process of paying employees on time even easier.

If outsourcing payroll is right for your small business, you should start outsourcing your payroll process by creating a budget, identifying the features you want, conducting research on service providers, and finally selecting one.

Talentnet, Vietnam’s premier human resources counselor, also the strategic partner with ADP Streamline – a world-class payroll provider, will support your organizations to accelerate the change through synchronized and integrated payroll frameworks with high security. Our “End to End Payroll & System Solution” will enable integration of client’s various systems, which automatically combine and cross-check data of Time & Attendance, Absence, Overtime and all other payroll-related data. If you are looking for an integrated Vietnam payroll system with risk-free consideration, please do not hesitate to contact us.