Spring cleaning your business: tips from the experts

hr tips
By Anthony Wolny | 13th April 2021 | 4 min read

As with every spring, it’s customary to give our homes a thorough clean to bid goodbye to the previous winter months, and this same exercise can be applied to businesses and their systems.

Following a year of dramatic change forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic, more businesses than ever have outdated processes that could do with being spruced up.

However, we fully appreciate that it can seem a daunting task to throw out your old ways of working.

To help spring clean your business, we’ve spoken with a range of industry experts from IRIS to provide you with tangible tips that you can take away and implement in your day-to-day.

Paul Haywood, Service Transformation Manager | Reviewing your payroll processes

When reviewing your payroll processes, it’s commonly split into the following categories:

Time

How long does it take for you to run your payroll each week/month?

This includes the time you spend collecting all timesheets, managing requests for overtime, calculating the appropriate rates, reconciling your pay runs and organising employee payments.

Depending on the size of your business, this can easily be a full-time job.

Knowledge

Payroll is not a button-pushing exercise but rather a chartered profession that feeds into many sectors of your business (notably HR/Finance), and getting payroll wrong is disastrous.

Over the past year, we have seen the introduction of Furlough Reclaims and IR35 along with further clampdowns of Anti-Money Laundering legislation and Payrolling Benefits.

Does your business have the skills necessary to successfully run your payroll and keep up with changes to ensure you do not suffer from non-compliance?

Cost

According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a Payroll Manager is £40,006 per year, and on top of this, costs for software licences, stationery and printing soon add up.

Perhaps you don’t have the in-house expertise for payroll, or it’s simply taking up too many resources. If that’s the case, have you considered payroll outsourcing?

To see if our all-in-one payroll outsourcing service is right for you, click here.

Claire Treadwell, Associate Product Director  | Removing your Payroll Year End pain

Payroll Year End is an enormous responsibility for every business that can easily consume a huge amount of your time.

Below are a few tips you can use to ease the process:

1) Be prepared

Ensure you have all the required payroll data, on time, from your line managers. You don’t want to make corrections in the new tax year.

2) Reconcile all previous periods

Check your reports against the HMRC website to make sure they balance – if they don’t, investigate why.

3) Prepare for new legislation

Research the latest payroll legislation to ensure you’re prepared for the new tax year.

4) Use Year End as an opportunity to review and tidy your payroll

Review your payroll elements – which ones do you still use? Is the payroll process you follow still fit for purpose? Is there something you can change to improve this?

If you think you could benefit from tidying up your payroll systems by implementing a new payroll software, click here to see our handy, cloud-based solution, IRIS Payroll Business. Alternatively, outsourcing your responsibility could suit your business better – click here to request a quote.

Stephanie Kelly, Chief People Officer | Moving HR to the cloud

As many businesses are talking about making the option to work from home a permanent feature, a key bit of advice I’d provide is to invest in a cloud-based HR solution.

By having software that can be accessed from anywhere, you can simplify processes for both employees and HR staff alike.

From an employee perspective, you give them the option to manage tasks such as booking holidays, requesting training or viewing their payslips from any location, at any time.

While for those managing HR, you provide them with the necessary tools needed via the cloud, enabling them to drive productivity and engagement across the business from their home, office or local coffee shop.

Matthew Routledge, HCM Product Manager | Payroll and HR integration

In many businesses, payroll and HR operate separately, but by integrating the systems, you can achieve a wide array of business benefits, including:

  • The removal of the need for manual spreadsheets, long-winded email chains and duplicated entries
  • Avoid inaccuracies in data which can lead to errors and result in a breach of GDPR
  • Remove the need for 2 suppliers
  • Give employees a single self-service interface for all information
  • Eliminate clashes/bugs in systems caused by updates
  • Deliver employee updates to payroll without manager/admin intervention

For more information on payroll and HR integration, download our handy guide here.

The all-in-one guide to optimising your processes

To help with your business spring clean, we’ve also created a handy guide covering key legislative changes you need to accommodate, common aspects that frequently require optimising, and how IRIS can help.

Click here to download the complimentary guide and discover how you can freshen up your ways of working.