Payroll World is one of the UK’s leading payroll magazines and the awards ceremony will take place at the Hilton London Bridge Hotel in London on November 16th, 2011. 

Advanced Business Solutions will join around 300 professionals from the payroll sector, and awards will be presented to teams and individuals who demonstrate their professionalism, pioneering efforts and commitment to improving the reputation of the payroll department.

To make the final of these prestigious awards, ABS had to demonstrate success in one or more of the following areas:

• Significant cost savings / business benefits to clients
• Customer satisfaction including client testimonials
• Innovative client solutions. 

So let’s hope we can raise another celebratory glass next month!

On a roll…. is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

One debate that causes consternation is the ownership of payroll. The discussion, as we have seen on our own Advanced Business Solutions (ABS) LinkedIn page, is both contested and heated (see a selection of responses, below).

Some executives believe that the HR team, who are required to communicate people issues on a daily basis, should own payroll. HR is a policy-heavy area and close interlinking with payroll can help the organisation to deal with auditing and governance concerns.

Others believe payroll is all about numbers and so should be owned by finance specialists. Payroll is the biggest expense for most organisations and the finance department must understand where money is being allocated.

But there is, however, broad agreement that payroll is a function in its own right. Many areas of the business must address payroll concerns. And this consensus, regardless of reporting lines, provides a useful means to address concerns around payroll ownership.

Regardless of where you feel payroll should sit within an organisation, the key element is to ensure that payroll does not operate in isolation. Payroll systems need to be integrated across the enterprise and interlinked with other software systems.

There are various benefits from adopting an integrated approach. First, information held in one system is automatically reflected across the organisation and staff will not need to spend time manually re-entering information. Such interlinking reduces duplication and, more importantly, slashes the potential for multiple data entry errors.

Second, close integration with finance systems can provide a boost for organisational efficiency. Cross-departmental linking means staff costs are accurately reported as soon as payroll processing takes place.

Finally, bringing together enterprise systems means that employees can benefit from a comprehensive view of IT and data. Your software provider should be able to cover all human and finance management needs, while also providing the subtle configuration to meet your specific business requirements.

As such, the answer to the initial question is perhaps more straightforward than you might expect – payroll can happily sit across an organisation as long as it is brought together through an integrated IT system.

Samples of the HR Vs finance payroll debate on ABS’ LinkedIn page:

- “Payroll sits as a satellite to both finance and HR and deserves much more respect than it does from its HR colleagues.”

- “There is no such beast as good communication between HR, finance and payroll. They all are only trying to protect their own empires. This is why it is so important to get the positioning correct.”

- “In my experience, payroll has been under HR and I think that’s where it belongs. HR and payroll are better integrated on decisions that impact how employees are paid. We have a close relationship with finance and they monitor what hits the general ledger. We’ve had no problems with segregation of duties between HR and payroll.”

- “From my experience payroll has always been under finance, if only to keep the separation of the HR and payroll functions. Many parts of payroll such as the cost centres and expense codes are assigned by finance and it helps to keep the payroll function closely aligned with other finance functions.”

- “It should sit with finance. The most successful organisations I have worked with has payroll as a part of finance.”

Where should payroll sit within an organisation? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Replacing good people is never going to be easy. Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that the cost of replacing a competent member of staff equates to approximately a year of that person’s salary.

Another key recruitment issue is that the selection process is not an exact science. HR professionals are required to jump through a series of administrative loopholes, running a series of interviews, sorting out contracts and inevitably picking someone that they think provides the best fit.

And as we all know from our interaction with new employees, there is no such thing as a perfect fit; organisations simply have to hope that the person selected through the timely and costly recruitment process proves an asset to the team. Recruitment is, therefore, a bit of a ‘finger in the air’ process.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. While any new employee is likely to come with a degree of risk, organisations can make use of specialist software to help ensure that the transition to fully-fledged team player is as painless as possible.

The right human capital management (HCM) software can provide a valuable asset to any recruitment strategy. From identifying a gap in the workforce and sifting through the candidates’ applications through to awarding the contract, HCM software can help generate significant efficiency and cost savings during the recruitment process whilst increasing the chance of recruiting the right type of person.

Look for automated HCM technology that will help you to match potential employees against established criteria. Integrated HCM reporting tools will also highlight the recruitment methods that have been most successful and at what cost. Such tools will also enable you to track the success of costly recruitment agencies, creating a preferred supplier list of worthy partners.

Finally, look to automate as much as possible to free-up the HR team’s time. Automating response letters and other recruitment correspondence can help slash administration costs. Meanwhile, electronic recruitment forms which can be automatically uploaded to the HCM system, will help save both time and expense.

Attempting to find the right person is never going to be easy. But it doesn’t have to be a struggle. And with the right software in place, you will have a good head start and the intelligence needed to do the best job possible as you attempt to identify that perfect needle in that rather large haystack!

Using software for smarter recruitment is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

• They prefer email as they cannot guarantee being able to answer the phone
• Copies of scheme rules must be sent with queries as HMRC has virtually nothing on file
• They have only three inspectors reviewing share scheme documents, compared with ten only a matter of years ago
• Correspondence is taking up to six weeks to turn around

They see one of the solutions to these problems, which are not going to abate, being the potential for scheme rules no longer to be approved by HMRC with employers simply taking professional advice.

One wonders what other radical service initiatives will begin to bite on employers as part of the huge reduction in departmental budgets. The decision to close 130 tax offices in March and the impact on access to tax enquiry centres has already caused consternation amongst civil service unions and taxpayers.

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd  
kateupcraft@btconnect.com

Revenue outlines service reduction for share support – is this the thin end of the wedge? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

The review will be concluded by 30 September and will be chaired by Paul Johnson, a senior associate at Frontier Economics and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The review will consider:

• the earnings threshold above which automatic enrolment applies
• minimum contribution levels before auto-enrolment is triggered
• the age bands for auto-enrolment
• whether all firms should have to auto-enroll
• whether postponement of auto-enrolment should be relaxed
• whether the private pension marked can sustain the up to 9m additional pension savers

Whist the Government committed to auto-enrolment in the Emergency Budget, it is sensible to initiate a review that will report quickly on some of the more contentious and complex elements of the scheme. Employers can then begin their planning in earnest from the autumn as this a huge project given that only a third of the workforce have current workplace pension provision.

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd
kateupcraft@btconnect.com

Review of NEST announced is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Their first task will be an immediate review of all regulations in the pipeline for implementation which have been inherited from the previous Government. The cost of implementing this amounts to £5bn annually before April 2011 and £19.1bn per annum thereafter, as identified by the Better Regulation Executive that sits within the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) remit (it will be interesting to see what will get the chop – for example additional paternity leave and pay will be costly for business but both parties are committed to extending ‘shared parenting’).

A one in, one out approach to new regulations – Labour were allegedly doing this anyway

What would you do away with in the payroll and HR arena? My vote would be for student loans to be collected through direct debit in the first instance and only payroll as a last resort (they do this for the last 23 months of the loan anyway) and a proper scrutiny of all the paper enquiries that government departments still send to employers when they already have the data in the public domain. Come on, you share our data with the world when you don’t mean to perhaps you could share it to help us instead!?

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd
kateupcraft@btconnect.com

Will the Cable plan unravel? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

‘It is important that the same works number on the P14 is also shown on the P46/P45(3), as different numbers can cause a data mismatch for HMRC resulting in duplication of records. The effect for employers is unnecessary correspondence from HMRC, increased administrative burden and unmatched employer data against HMRC systems.‘

Excuse me but why do HMRC expect works numbers to be static? For many employers the works number contains digits that refer to an internal cost centre, hence when an employee moves jobs internally their number changes, so of course it won’t be the same as the number when they were recruited years previously – in some businesses it may change almost annually as a result of restructuring and career moves. If only HMRC had asked the employer representative bodies if using works numbers as a match was a good idea before designing a system around them perhaps some of the current issues for taxpayers and the admin burden for employers of wrong tax codes could have been avoided. HMRC’s good work in consulting with employers gets undone when fundamental decisions such as this bypass the forums they have set up to scrutinise them. 

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd  
kateupcraft@btconnect.com

Why are HMRC obsessed with works numbers? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment