Q&A on Payroll Management Systems

What is the payroll?

A payroll is a company’s list of its employees, but the term is commonly used to refer to: the total amount of money that a company pays to its employees. A company’s records of its employees’ salaries and wages, bonuses, and withheld taxes. the company’s department that calculates and pays these.

What is payroll management in HR?

Payroll refers to the process by which employees receive their salary. Functions involve balancing and reconciling payroll data and depositing and reporting taxes. The payroll department takes care of wage deductions, record keeping and verifying the reliability of pay data.

What is the process of payroll?

Payroll involves performing many tasks to ensure accurate and timely paychecks and payroll tax and record-keeping compliance. Process the payroll ahead of time. Devise a payroll-processing schedule that allows you ample time to process the payroll and to correct detected errors before employees receive their paychecks.

How does the payroll work?

A payroll system involves everything that has to do with the payment of employees and the filing of employment taxes. This includes keeping track of hours, calculating wages, withholding taxes and other deductions, printing and delivering checks and paying employment taxes to the government.

How do you audit payroll?

A good time frame for scheduling a payroll audit is at the end of each quarter of business.
Verify Active Employees
Verify Pay Rate
Review Hours Paid
Compare Payroll Reports to General Ledger
Review Payroll Tax Submissions
Bank Reconciliation Review

What is the role of payroll?

The Payroll function is one of the fundamental functions of any organisation. At the basic level, it ensures that all employees receive their wages. In practice, the payroll function extends to a fairly wide range of administrative and labour issues.

Why payroll is so important?

The importance of payroll in an organisation. Payroll is an integral part of all organisations. The payroll department is not only responsible for employees’ salary compensation, but it also plays a vital role in protecting the company’s reputation by ensuring compliance with various legislations.

What are the uses of a payroll management system?

The Payroll Management System deals with the financial aspects of employee’s salary, allowances, deductions, gross pay, net pay etc. and generation of pay-slips for a specific period. The outstanding benefit of Payroll Management System is its easy implementation.

What is a payroll administrator?

Payroll administration is defined as any of the tasks necessary to organize the compensation of employees for the hours that have been worked. This may include keeping totals for hours worked by employees, rates of pay and managing payments to employees.

What is a payroll management system?

A payroll management system is the system by which employers can pay the employees for the work they have completed. Although payroll seems like a mundane task, it involves many aspects including the withholding of taxes from each paycheck and making sure accurate funds are paid to the correct government agency.

What is payroll management software?

Payroll software is technology that aims to streamline and automate the process of paying a company’s employees. Payroll software can be purchased from a human resources technology vendor or included as a module within a larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) package.

What is payroll accounting?

On the income statement, payroll expenses are part of labor costs. They include employee salaries, employer payments for health insurance or similar benefits, payroll taxes paid by the employer, bonuses, commissions and similar expenses.

Components of a Payroll System

To make sure that they comply with Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and state and local government laws, companies must include crucial employee and company information in their payroll systems. Setting up and running the different components that comprise a payroll system requires due diligence and adequate knowledge of tax legislation.

Employee information

During the new hire process, companies must collect information such as medical insurance and W-4 forms to determine what should be deducted from an employee’s paycheck. These forms also provide employers with crucial information, such as the employee’s Social Security number and their withholding amount for federal and state tax purposes. The system must also track and process changes made to the employee’s tax exemption status, pensions, insurance plans or retirement funds.

Salary information

As part of the new hire process, payroll systems include a component that designates which employees are full time, part time and contractors. Classifying workers in a payroll system is important since the government levies high penalties on companies that categorize employees incorrectly.

Timesheets

Without knowledge of the number of hours an employee has worked, employers cannot determine what to pay an employee. While some workers are paid a salary, others are compensated hourly or designated as nonexempt employees. Payroll systems include timesheet information or areas where hourly and nonexempt employee hours are recorded and reviewed for accuracy. Information can be collected through a computerized time clock, punch card stamp clock or paper timesheet.

Applicable taxes and deductions

Although the IRS provides companies with tax tables to calculate employee tax withholdings, vendors and payroll computer systems can also supply this information. Employers must consider year-to-date annual earnings, wage levels and tax allowances when summarizing applicable taxes. In addition, payroll systems must calculate deductions made through pension plans, 401(k)s, insurance plans, union dues and garnishments. The payroll department also monitors loans and other deductions that have cap amounts and ceases paycheck deductions when the total amount has been repaid.

Payroll register

The payroll register summarizes employee earnings and deduction information in a journal entry that is inserted into the general ledger for accounting and general research purposes. Payroll registers are also used to create tax reports. These documents are prepared by payroll staff or generated using payroll computer systems.

Manual payments

Occasionally, companies issue manual paychecks to employees between pay periods because of termination or a payroll error. Payroll systems must account for the check amount in the payroll register for tax and reporting purposes. This ensures that the employer’s tax withholding amount is reconciled with employee deductions.

Payroll refers to the administration of employees’ salaries, wages, bonuses, net pay, and deductions. It consist of the employee ID, employee name, date of joining, daily attendance record, basic salary, allowances, overtime pay, bonus, commissions, incentives, pay for holidays, vacations and sickness, value of meals and lodging etc. There are some deductions such as PF, taxes, loan instalments or advances taken by employee. While administrating the monthly payroll basic salary, HRA, conveyance, and other special allowances such mobile, etc are considered. There are some deductions which are provident fund (12%) of the salary, taxes and other deductions.

Deductions such as tax and loan/advances taken by the employee from organizations are deducted only where applicable. Dearness Allowance and House rent allowance is provided at a fixed rate stated by the employment law. Provident fund is deducted from the gross salary of employee on the monthly basis as per the employment law, which is provided later to the employee. Organizations also contribute the same amount to the provident fund of the employee.

Annual payroll consists of leave travel allowances, incentives, annual bonuses, meal vouchers/reimbursements, and medical reimbursements. Allowances, incentives, bonuses and reimbursements are based on organizational policies. Some organizations provided the allowances on a fixed rate say 10% or 12% of the basic salary. Some organizations go for performance based incentives.

Significance Of Payroll Outsourcing

The outsourcing industry is growing at a higher rate. HR outsourcing helps the HR professionals free themselves from the daily routine work and take part in the strategic level processes. Organizations really do not take HR as a strategic function; it is merely treated as paper work division. Therefore they want to reduce the cost being spent on HR activities.

In India payroll outsourcing is one of the HR processes and is being outsourced since 1997. Payroll outsourcing involves an external organization performing all the activities related to payroll management.

HR Consultancies such as Ma Foi and many other firms have come up with payroll outsourcing.Outsourcing organizations strive for providing cost saving benefits to their clients. The organizations use its marketing division thoroughly to acquire more number of clients and retain them. Payroll outsourcing does not provide much cost reduction but it yield in high quality. Since compensation outsourcing requires lot of market survey and industry knowledge, it is not easy for an organization to carry the tasks with its operational business activities.

Outsourcing has benefited not only the service providers but also organizations and economy of the country. It enables the management to focus on the core competencies and strategic planning. It maintains the confidentiality of the pay package offered to employees as it is an external body administrating. Organizations do not have to keep the track of law related to salaries and compensation; it is the outsourcing firm which has to look after it. It offers qualitative results. It is very much time saving and cost effective. It also offers legal protection as the outsourcing firm is responsible for all the legal matters.

Outsourcing firms enjoys the revenue benefits as the services are being offered to MNCs. Service exports have caused the economic system to develop more and contribute to GDP growth.