How to Choose a Payroll Service Provider? A Complete Guide

No one’s as patient as Job, especially when they are told that there may be delays in salary credit. Being as patient is a job, especially in today’s fast-paced world. Expect no-shows, late comings, shortcomings, murmurs of disapproval and heavy hearts. What your employees maybe won’t tell you is they value being valued, and that a timely salary credit can keep most disagreements at bay.

As an employer, your top prerogative must be to ensure that your employees are paid on time, as this can be a significant game-changer when it comes to employee satisfaction and morale. Outsourcing your payroll operations may be a good idea, provided it is a payroll service provider of repute, with a clear vision and mission.

This will not only help save time, but it enhances the employee experience and is cost-effective as well. Choosing a payroll service provider shouldn’t be an arduous task, so here we break it down for you.

What is a Payroll Service Provider?

A payroll service provider manages all the payroll-related requirements of a company. These services primarily include tracking employee time, deciding the pay and then distributing the payment. It also includes a lot of accounting, record-keeping and filing of taxes.

What are the Types of Payroll Services?

Automatic payroll calculation and processing

In this service, the amount due to each employee is calculated, generally based on the number of hours worked or leaves encashed – any measure of the work that is done and can be accounted for. The processing of the payroll happens without any manual intervention and therefore is free of human error.

Payroll deductions, tax withholding and filing.

This includes all services that help calculate the TDS or the total deductions at source. The tax filing and the possibility offered to employees to avail benefits to save on tax are part of the services included in this group. This is another very important aspect that you must look into when choosing a payroll service provider.

Integrating payroll and business insight software

Here is where it gets tricky when choosing the right payroll service provider. Payroll must be integrated with business insight software. This will help glean insights from employee data.

The advantage of doing this is that it can help understand employee performance, provide options to improve employee’s work style to boost productivity, and suggest changes to existing role and responsibility and possibly even change to another team for improved collaboration.

Expert compliance advice

The Government underlines clear policies on how payroll is to be managed. These include controls, guidelines, methodologies, and policies established for the payment of dues to employees, benefiting each one of them. Companies must stick to these policies to ensure that every employee is cared for in a manner that is acceptable, in keeping with government regulations.

A good payroll services provider/partner is very meticulous and dedicated to ensuring that compliance is maintained. So, take some more time, do a bit of research, and arrive at the best in the business.

Detailed payroll reporting

Generating a payroll report is harder than most people think it is, and you may need the services of a payroll service provider only to generate a report that is compliant with government policies and error-free. When choosing a payroll services provider therefore, this is another valid point worth noting.

Accurate record maintenance

Identity theft is highly rampant, and employee data is highly confidential.

Payroll processing service providers realize that accurate record maintenance is crucial to the whole process of payroll management. Accurate records help ensure that errors in payment and marking of leaves are eliminated. Maintaining a record of all employee data in a secure manner can help ensure that the insights gleaned from the integration of business intelligence tools are very good and accurate too. So, make sure you are choosing the right payroll services provider.

Sick leave and absence management

Allocating sick leave to employees must be done on a fair basis and without any errors.  The computation of salary must be accurate and take into account the leaves availed or the leave encashed, and those carried forward. A payroll services provider can help with leave management.

New employee registration and onboarding

A new employee’s first look into the company culture and work environment is the company website, but what sticks and consolidates their point of view is the onboarding experience in the company. The onboarding experience must be phenomenal and easy to get through, to ensure that the new recruit feels wanted and at home in his new workplace, ready and eager to fulfill his roles and responsibilities. A payroll services provider sometimes provides additional HR services, such as the onboarding of new employees.

How to Choose a Payroll Service Provider?

There are several things that you need to look for in when choosing the right payroll services provider. Some of the key characteristics you must look for in a payroll service provider are:

Ability to control costs

The first thing that comes running to your mind when you decide to outsource your payroll requirements, rather than managing it in-house, is how much of a cost-saving it might be. Controlling the cost of payroll outsourcing is a challenge. It will cost you less than recruiting an entire tam in-house, but hidden charges can play spoilsport here.

Accuracy of data

How accurate is the data that the payroll services provider is getting? Is it possible that you can collaborate with the right payroll services provider to improve the quality of data? If you are able to do both, then the record keeping of employees is very accurate, and you can expect payments to be done in the right amounts to the right person and without any delay on a particular day every month.

Expertise

When you finalize from a list of providers and choose the right payroll services provider, you will have a team of experts to handle the payroll services. These will be subject matter experts, each qualified in a particular area of payroll services. After a detailed demo which will highlight the expertise levels of the payroll services provider, you must also look at the conditions onsite within their company and get a firsthand opinion of the people in their operations team managing payroll services.

Process control

For many companies outsourcing their payroll is like losing control of their payroll processing. This may be the case, but with a bad provider. A good provider allows you to maintain control over your current payroll, to the extent that you would like to, even though the process is automated. Choosing a great payroll services provider is crucial to how well payroll processes are managed in your organization.

Data security

How secure is your employee data in the servers of a third-party service provider? Are the servers susceptible to hacks and exploits? A payroll services provider will ensure that the employee data is secure and encrypted and that only people with appropriate access can get to the employee data.

Customer reviews

How popular is the payroll services provider? How many customers have they worked for and how happy or satisfied are they? Was the payroll services provider able to live up to the expectations and convert a bad experience into a good one? These are some of the questions you must try to answer from a reading of the customer reviews.

Difference between Automated Payroll System and Manual Payroll System

Payroll systems are really old, and date way back to 6000 BC in Greece. But from stone tablets to corporate worksheets, payroll processing evolved and reached a quite advanced stage. Before the advent of an automated payroll system, HR and finance teams had to be the thickest of friends.

Any miscommunication and the payments due to half the payroll would be affected! Enter automated payroll systems, and the whole scenario changed. An automated payroll system can manage all aspects of payroll processing without any human intervention.

This was new, great for large companies, and reduced unnecessary workload. In this article we will tell you how to pick an automated payroll services provider and what you can expect from them.

Are you Ready to Hire a Payroll Services Provider?

You must have realized by now that “behind every successful employee is an on-time salary”. If you are already weighing the options offered by different payroll service providers in your mind, then you are already on the cusp of a great discovery, a discovery of greater efficiency and speed in your payroll services. If you are ready to rediscover how less cumbersome payroll can be, talk to Alp Consulting today.

We do all that is mentioned in this guide and a lot more so that your employees have a great work experience, and you get better ROI. We are waiting to hear from you and assist you dispense those pay checks on time and win over the hearts of your employees and the rest of the world.