A payroll firm is a provider of services that will automatically perform payroll computations, payroll tax statements, year-end taxes, and a variety of other tax-related tasks for your business. A Payroll bedrijf ” payroll company ” that offers comprehensive services will also take care of your employees’ deposits and withdrawals, as well as withholdings, garnishments, and reporting of new hires. When you use a payroll system, it is much simpler to pay all of your workers, whether they are full-time, part-time, or independent contractors. Your payroll can be handled by professionals while you concentrate on running your business thanks to this feature.

 

Payroll is more important to the mission than ever:

We are in the middle of the worst world crisis that many of us have ever seen. The spread of COVID-19 has had a big effect on people’s lives and businesses all over the world. The government shut down national borders, schools, and businesses. Those businesses that stayed open set up work-from-home policies, and curfews and restrictions on how people could move around were put in place.

During times like these, many business functions slow down (for example, production stops, sales slow down, and professional services get behind schedule). However, payroll is one function that needs to step up, and its role as a mission-critical one becomes clearer than ever. People still need to get paid, whether it’s the nurse working overtime in the hospital, the office worker working from home, or the employee out on sick leave. If people don’t get paid, things start to slow down and stop.

How does COVID-19 affect the way you run your payroll?

As a Payroll provider, you need to make sure that your team keeps providing reliable payroll services to your clients even though the economy is bad. Your clients and, in the end, the economy as a whole depend on it. Now more than ever, they need you.

But your Payroll operations could be affected in the following ways:

• Some of your team members might be sick or have to take care of kids or elderly family members at home. This could make it hard for them to do their jobs or mean they need more flexible work arrangements (e.g. part-time, flex-time work schedules).
• When working from home, your staff might not be able to access all the tools and documents they would normally be able to. This is especially true if your systems are on-premise solutions and files and documents are hard copies.
• Some of your processes and procedures might need people to be there in person. For example, if your team is working remotely, physical sign-offs or to-do lists/checklists on the office whiteboard won’t work.
• If you don’t have all the data or information you need (for example, if you don’t have accurate timesheets), you may need to run temporary, emergency pay cycles based on the values from the previous month to make sure people get paid. You can make any necessary adjustments later.
• Bank systems could be affected, and especially in countries where paying employees depends on physical transactions (like giving out bank checks), other options will have to be thought of.
  In many countries, filing paperwork with a tax or social security offices still needs to be done in person, which could also be a problem for people who can’t move around.
• At the same time, governments are setting up emergency programs to help businesses and employees, such as lowering taxes and making sick leave rules less strict. So, your payroll team needs to update its calculations quickly and make sure that the new rules are taken into account in how deductions and withholdings are done.

How to deal with the “New Normal”

Even though the current COVID-19 crisis might seem like a short-term problem that will hopefully “blow over” soon (some experts think it will be over by the time it gets warmer in the summer), no one knows how long it will last. Even more important, it should be a wake-up call for all of us. The next crisis could happen at any time. Just a few days ago, it was hard to imagine things like closed borders, curfews, closed schools and public life, and closed businesses. But now, all of these things are happening. And we need to be ready for the next disaster, no matter how unlikely or unthinkable it may seem: a virus, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, meteorite, etc.

So, how can you adjust to the “new normal” during this crisis and lighten the load on your team when things are so out of the ordinary? We think that any Payroll Service Provider should pay attention to the following six things:

• REMOVE PEOPLE DEPENDENCIES

Review your roles and duties and make arrangements for team members away of the office. Establish automated delegation routines to give the replacement/delegate access to conversations and documents if the many process owner is out of the office.

• DIGITIZE YOUR WORKFLOWS

Reduce the use of physical papers and in-person payroll processes. Digitize and cloud-host your workflows and records for optimum resiliency (information can be automatically backed up too many different places in the cloud). Digitizing your workflows gives you central, remote visibility into how your team is progressing and lets you remain on top of things.

• PUT YOUR PROCESSES ON AUTOPILOT

Reduced human intervention reduces interruptions. No-touch systems allow payroll processing even when employees are out of the office. especially when technology is durable and redundant. If you automate payroll data flows to your accounting system, you won’t need the local payroll or finance team to make data extracts for payments.

• PROVIDE BETTER COMMUNICATION

Reduce in-person communication, which lacks documentation. Instead of email and shared drives, use current communication and collaboration tools to message team members or log requests in the context of the process or workflow. This improves team communication and security.

• BUILD SECURE ACCESS TO DATA AND FILES FROM AWAY

Securely archive all your data and files in the cloud. Convert paper payslips to electronic files (e.g. online employee portal). Thus, you and your clients can access vital data anytime, anywhere. You can use past months’ data to run emergency payrolls.

• PLAN AND TEST

The current crisis emphasizes the need to anticipate employee, office, and technology infrastructure catastrophes and carefully plan responses. How can you secure business continuity? How long/expensive? How should you prepare now? Test your response strategy with fire drills so your staff knows what to do in a disaster.

 

Conclusion:

The aforementioned suggestions will help you manage the crisis and plan for the future, but they will also boost your team’s operational efficiency (e.g., by automating manual tasks) and improve customer service. Their implementation cannot be delayed.