3 Attributes Your Small Business Should Look For in a Payroll System

It doesn’t matter whether you’re running the largest corporation in the world or a small independent shop – businesses of all sizes need to have an effective solution for processing payroll. There’s no room for error when it comes to getting your employees paid in the full and at the appropriate times. Workers demand full and just compensation for their labors.
In order to eliminate even the slightest possibility of errors, it’s best to go with a technology solution that can manage all of your company’s compensation data automatically. No more fumbling through folders full of pay documents, and no more punching numbers into calculators – you need a payroll system that will handle all of that work for you and help you sleep easy.
As with any other aspect of business, the best way to handle your payroll process is to make information available online so that employees and managers can access it quickly and painlessly.

I covered some of these items in a recent piece for Business 2 Community. For growing businesses, chances are the technology you started out for payroll and HR may no longer be the best solution. By moving your processes to the cloud (where technology resides on the provider’s server), you can tear down all the roadblocks that are keeping your HR office from reaching its full potential. A subscription model streams the extent of functionality you want via broadband Internet. Ideally, the solution should include time and attendance, as well as benefits administration, all running on a single application.
Are you wondering how best to use these new cloud solutions for handling your organization’s needs? The good news is, you don’t have to be a mega-corporation to make it work. At Pakistan, we asked our our customers what they look for in a payroll solution, and found that the following three attributes are most important for enabling mid-sized businesses to achieve payroll processing success:

Reliability

According to our customers, they ranked reliability of utmost importance. Employers need a solution that will work every time – processing all the relevant data and getting all employees paid in full, without fail. Cloud-based solutions are as reliable as they come. As long as you have an Internet connection, you can pay the entire workforce at the click of a mouse.

Accuracy

It can be difficult to pay your entire staff in the right amounts at the right times. If everyone’s wages and hours are slightly different, it’s easy to make a slight mistake (which is frustrating for your employees and can be costly for you). But when you use a cloud solution that keeps everyone’s payroll information accurate and up to date, you can sleep easy knowing people are being paid correctly.

Compliance

The regulatory landscape is always changing. For small businesses, there is a good chance that the employer mandate is overwhelming your current system. If you use a cloud solution to automate the process, for example, your payroll administrator can know in real-time if employees have been assigned overtime hours.