Chika Uwazie’s TalentBase: 5 Ways Nigerian Companies Can Simplify Their Payroll Systems

The importance of payroll in business operations cannot be understated, and same can be said about how much resources it takes to manage payroll effectively. Payroll typically takes up to 35% of business expenses, and to not plan this properly is like shooting one’s self in the foot. The key to understanding how to minimize the cost of managing payroll is first understanding the specific tasks you wish to accomplish, and how to simplify them.

We are going to share five tips that will help you simplify your payroll.

Automatic Tax Deduction
All the amazing things we want the government to do for us require that we pay our taxes, on time. Inaccurate remission of tax is a crime, and this includes tax defaults due to lateness. If your company falls into the list of defaulters, then it might be that you need to rework your payroll process. Tax payments often require accuracy on employee numbers and sometimes physical management of this can be tedious and error-prone. To solve this, you need to go the e-filing route. This means your payroll system collates the data you need for the right tax calculations and makes the deduction; and when changes need to be made, they cause very little disruption.

Cloud Storage & Enquiries
The joy of modern payroll is the ease with which employees can get whatever information they need whenever they need. If your business manages salary payments on paper, responding to requests becomes a tedious task. The stationery, the time to type out the response and much more. But a payroll software solves all these. Not only can you provide a payment advice online, you can also have responses to frequently asked questions and not have to bother to respond to every question all over. More so, no paper restriction; so your responses can be more detailed.

Direct Deposit 
The end goal of payroll is to remit salaries and any rewards earned to employees. The simplest way to achieve this is to utilize direct deposit, which means that after the payroll system runs the calculation on the set parameters for a full pay, it automatically sends out all wages to those who have earned them. No bank visits, no queues. Everything done at the snap of the finger, and everyone is happy!

Ease of Claims
Reconciling personal expenses made can be a hard process especially when employees have to present lots and lots of paper receipts and written notes to show actual expenditure. A good payroll software should take this into consideration, making provisions for such expenses to automatically reflect on the actually payroll as reimbursement without employees having to so many receipts. Card integrations and other e-payment gateways can make implementing this possible. E-receipt integrations too.

Time Management
If your business has workers on an hourly rate, manually managing this can be as tedious. While you can call in favours with the person in charge of the time counter or time management ledger, it would be fun to see how employees might call in favours with the time machine. Getting a software to monitor time in and time out makes collation easier and boosts accuracy.

You might have noticed these simplification processes all revolve round deploying technology in your business. Don’t get left behind while everyone else is innovating at their business. Do the needful and join the smart managers.