This Week let’s dive into one of the more frustrating aspects of employee management.

Payroll

More importantly why does it seem to be impossible to have a query free payroll.

You have done all the hard work checked and double checked, crossed your T’s and dotted your I’s…

And still to your horror one or more employees end up coming to your desk with a query.

Queries can usually be divided into a few categories.

1 – Capturing queries: Where the fault lies with the manual capturing of hours or alternatively with the setup on Automatic payroll Software.

2 – Authorizing queries: Where an employee either came in early or left late at their own request and expected to be compensated for the extra hours.

3 – Communication queries: This happens when an employee does not fully understand his remuneration setup, for example, only time is calculated after a certain amount of worked hours during the week not daily, or even that lunch is unpaid.

4 – Falsified queries: Which you would often get if employees are aware that you are struggling to get your payroll 100% right and try their hand at getting a couple of extra hours for the month.

There are of course other types of queries as well and I look forward to hearing from you about the different challenges faced in the course of a payroll cycle.

To start off with we can have a look at how to best deal with capturing queries.

And as with most large sets off data the best way to avoid mistakes is through checks and balances.

They way we approach capturing or inputting hours at Omniform is through bulk uploads.

Once the hours are on the Software platform Employees hours are viewed against the shift to look for any extra or short worked hours.

These extra hours are then overridden to allow for payment.

When we use an override in a sense we are saying the employee was supposed to work from 07:00 to 17:00 but in fact worked until 17:30.

So we extend the shift from 07:00 to 17:30 to allow for all the hours to be paid.

This helps a lot with instances where the input hours have anomalies such as 07:00 to 05:00 being captured

Those kind of anomalies can easily be picked up and verified or corrected with ever becoming a query.

Authorization queries are also greatly reduced by using the override system that shows where an employee worked outside the normal shift hours.

Another factor that assists with Authorization queries is getting payslips out as quickly as possibly to avoid a situation where the employee was supposed to be paid 2 hours over time but was short paid.

If the payslips can be send out to employees within 48 hours employees can have changes made before the actual payroll and avoid payroll queries.

Communication queries are best handled well…through communication.

but it is also important that all parties the form the link between payroll and the employees are well aware of how the payroll set ups are put together.

It is also important that the information is clearly set out in the employee contract.

And hopefully by combining the solutions within the first three topics employees will not see the opportunity for falsified queries.

Importantly queries are often best avoided if their is mutual trust between the payroll department, managers and employees.

We hope you find the above insightful and continue following our weekly blog posts on employee management.