HR is often one of the most overworked and understaffed departments in a company. They have to answer dozens of benefits questions every day, manage new hires, coordinate paperwork — often with stacks of their own papers to sort through. HR automation can provide an easier and more cost-effective way to get these tasks done.
Payroll
When you automate your payroll, you process it in a system rather than by hand. Doing payroll manually is much slower — it often takes days instead of hours — and has a much higher chance of error than an automated system.
There are countless ways for businesses of all sizes to automate payroll, such as QuickBooks, PayChex or ADP. The benefits of automating your payroll include:
- Accurate calculations: Instead of entering taxes, deductions, overtime, commissions and other discrepancies, automation automatically calculates each item for you and determines the correct results.
- Payroll: The IRS requires that employee tax records be kept for at least 4 years, and the US Department of Labor requires that payroll records be kept for at least 3 years. Keeping these digitally, rather than in binders in different locations, saves a lot of time and headaches when it comes to an audit.
- Better time management: Reduce errors when manually recording hours worked or time off requests and prevent overpaying or underpaying your employees. This leads us to the next feature…
Read More… Essential Functions for a Payroll Management Software
Time management/time sheets
If you use a manual timesheet, your employees usually enter their hours after they have already happened. Often it’s the end of the week via a spreadsheet or pencilling in numbers.
Unfortunately, not everyone’s memory is perfect, and this method of recording time carries a much higher risk of falsifying the numbers. Of course, this is usually not meant maliciously; some people forget when something unusual has happened during the week that has caused a shift in the schedule. Accidents on the road, doctor’s appointments or the need to pick up a sick child are examples of this. However, there is always an employee who intentionally commits time fraud or has terrible handwriting, which can also be a significant pain when it comes to billing time.
There are several options for digital timekeeping, such as investing in a biometric time clock or requiring employees to log in to a timekeeping website for their hours. The data would then be collated and ready for payroll.
Onboarding and recruitment
The HR department spends countless hours gathering all the necessary data for recruiting and onboarding new employees. During this process, they have to manage a large amount of paperwork, including the new employee’s CV, job description, tax forms and the like. Most of the time, this is also paperwork that is passed back and forth between different people as they work on different processes. You can see how easy it can be to lose paperwork or prolong the hiring process.
Automating onboarding or recruitment (and even offboarding) can greatly improve the experience by reducing human error, preventing the loss of paperwork and improving visibility of the status of hiring between departments. In addition, an AI application integrated with the HR automation solution can make the recruitment and onboarding process much more interactive, with the HR chatbot guiding new employees as they fill in the information. HR chatbots can remove any doubts employees may have, saving a lot of time for HR to focus on more strategic aspects of the business.
Records management
Records management has been hinted at above, but it really goes much deeper than IRS and USDoL guidelines. Automating your records management not only reduces the burden of having to dig through years of paperwork to find a specific document, and allows you to access all the information you need on demand. It contributes to greater transparency, efficiency and accountability. Another bonus? It saves a lot of space in the filing cabinet.
Advantages
There are a handful of reasons why benefits change all the time: life-changing events, new employees, open enrollment and others. It’s not easy to track benefits, especially if you rely solely on paper documents.
Managing employee benefits through a consolidated HR portal can reduce the cost of administering benefits. A few examples of how to get an automated benefits platform include.
- Automating the benefits eligibility process
- Educating employees at the time of enrolment about the company’s benefits offered and their options
- Allowing employees to make changes to their plans when life-changing events occur, such as marriage, a new child, divorce or relocation
- Eliminate the headaches of managing open enrollment, onboarding and other benefits
Evaluations
Would you believe that more than half of companies do not have an effective evaluation structure? Many companies conduct annual appraisals that simply don’t work. There are plenty of reasons for this, but the main reason is that they don’t track employee progress throughout the year, only the last quarter.
Creating a streamlined, automated process for evaluating employees helps them clearly understand their tasks, helps their managers keep track of the things they need to work on as well as the things they excel at, and encourages collaboration.
Tax documents & forms
When it comes to tax compliance, automation gives you the ability to scale quickly. Automating your tax documentation and using a cloud-based service helps you verify that you are calculating the correct taxes for your business as well as use taxes. You also have the advantage of receiving up-to-date information on requirements and tax rates from around the world.
Find Out More… Three Paths of HRM Automation
