Payroll Best Practices

While some of these pros started out in an accounting or human resources department, many worked in completely unrelated departments. Regardless, this “tap on the shoulder” started them down the path of acquiring payroll knowledge in a variety of ways. The most common way they acquired payroll knowledge is years of “on the job” learning – when a new situation arose, so did the opportunity to do research and find out the answer. Another common way our payroll professionals obtained payroll knowledge is through the pursuit and attainment of certifications, such as the American Payroll Association’s Certified Payroll Professional (CPP).

So, what can you do as an employer when you know that your payroll practice can be improved, but your own payroll staff has gaps in their knowledge, have never been faced with certain situations before that are now impacting your business, or they don’t have the extensive payroll knowledge and experience that comes with a payroll certification?

Take a step back and evaluate to help identify best practice recommendations for your organization’s payroll department. While each of our payroll professionals’ backgrounds vary in depth and breadth, we work together as a team and consolidate knowledge from across our organization to build tools and resources to help our clients build compliant, efficient payroll department practices.

Some questions may come to mind as you’re evaluating the need for this type of service:

• Are our practices compliant with the law?
• Is an error rate of this size reasonable?
• What kind of training does my staff need and who can provide it?
• Does a better method exist to pay employees faster when errors are made?
• Could we implement different guidelines to improve processing timeliness?
• What is the best way to audit payroll before and after we “push the button?”
• How can we improve G/L accounting?
• Does the payroll system we’re using have additional functionality that could improve our processes?
• How can we get employees to submit data timely?
• Is it important to have a payroll processing manual?

How can PayTech Assist?

PayTech can help your team answer all of these questions and more! Our best practices recommendations methodology is robust and covers these eight key payroll practice areas, which can be applied to any HCM/HRIS/payroll processing system that your organization uses:

• General Best Practices
• Communication
• Compliance
• Tax Compliance
• Technology
• Documentation
• Data Organization/Security