The bright future of payroll

August 16, 2010 Adam Gorley Employment/Labour Standards, HRMS, Human Resources, Payroll

payroll

A recent issue of the Canadian Payroll Association‘s magazine Dialogues looked at how payroll technology will be changing in the next few years, and what that will mean for the payroll industry—and the businesses it supports. Turns out, the next few years are looking pretty rosy for payroll professionals. Here are some insights:

Recording employees’ payroll, time, attendance and absence information will become increasingly complex as the workforce becomes more mobile—spending more time away from the workplace—and more temporary.
Software will help businesses to keep up by integrating payroll, HR and time and attendance management functions. This will allow organizations to make better decisions on overtime, staffing and service levels and human resources in general.
Software will also automate these functions, reducing errors and speeding up HR processes, all in a handsome user-friendly package.
With better software, payroll professionals will spend less time pushing pencils and gathering information, and more time thinking strategy and making decisions. “The payroll department will be seen as an important strategic resource to help the CFO and department managers make better decisions”, said one such professional on the software side.
If that’s not enough, software will save businesses money by improving payroll, time, attendance, absence and HR management, and reducing errors, and help improve their carbon footprint by limiting the use of paper and other resources.

It all just sounds so lovely. And why not? These are probably the sorts of tasks that computers should do—and generally they do them well—leaving workers to do the things that people do best.

Of course you’ll have to involve IT in these changes, since they’re the ones who are going to have to set it up. Information Technology PolicyPro from First Reference offers chapters of valuable material and policies on Planning, Software acquisition, maintenance and disposal, Systems management, Data management, Security, Storage and backup, Training and support, and much more. Note that we recently updated the entire contents of Chapter 2 — Systems acquisition, maintenance and disposal.

There are privacy implications, too (requires subscription to HRinfodesk).

Do you use a human resources management system (HRMS)? Answer the poll on HRinfodesk.

We don’t mind mentioning that First Reference produces its own compliance-focused human resources management system.

Adam Gorley
First Reference Human Resources and Internal Controls Compliance Editor

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Adam Gorley

Editor at First Reference Inc.

Adam Gorley is a copywriter, editor and researcher at First Reference. He contributes regularly to First Reference Talks, Inside Internal Controls and other First Reference publications. He writes about general HR issues, accessibility, privacy, technology in the workplace, accommodation, violence and harassment, internal controls and more. Read more