hivepayroll logo

What to Look for in a Payroll Software Service

What to Look for in a Payroll Software Service

Millions of organizations rely on payroll systems to adequately manage and streamline their employees’ compensation. Payroll software is a cloud-based solution that maintains, addresses, and automates employee payments.

However, many small companies don’t invest in this software solution and perform payroll manually. Manual payroll operations have many issues, such as more time consumption, errors in compensation, and reduced efficiency. Investing in payroll software to mitigate these errors and improve your payroll operation is essential. If you are looking for payroll software, you should consider various factors.

What is the purpose of the payroll system?

Generally, companies use payroll management software to organize their employee’s salaries and tax filing tasks. It also provides accurate compensation, deductions, and rewards for employees. It also keeps records of employee pay rates, work hours, contracts, and deductions. It saves a lot of space and time to store this information manually. This system integrates with the other core business systems. Most payroll companies offer software with many features, such as employee self-service, reporting, analytics, and more.

1. User Experience

When investing in software, you should place yourself in the user’s shoes. You should make sure it is mobile-friendly and both managers and employees take action 24/7. Choose the payroll software that is easy to use and navigate for everyone. You should also make sure that the software doesn’t have unnecessary features.
Filing payroll taxes accurately on time is essential as it lowers the risk of your company getting a costly fine. Get the payroll software that offers tax filing services. Maintaining compliance is time-consuming, but with payroll, you can maintain compliance and report to all government agencies on time.
You should invest in an automated payroll software solution that saves time and money. The software should also feature employee service, which helps employees easily navigate the system and access their data, such as pay stubs, year-end tax forms, and PTO balances.
Look for integrated payroll, time systems, and HR systems, as using one system across the organization reduces the time needed for dealing with duplicate entries. Using an integrated payroll system also helps save you from paying maintenance costs for multiple software.
The payroll software service provider needs your organization’s information, such as employees’ home addresses, social security numbers, department names, deductions, job classifications, and more, to determine the implementation process flow. Choose payroll software that references other customers with similar business payroll software to ensure your organization’s implementation goes well.
Other than tax laws, organizations have to follow more rules and regulations. If you fail to follow the regulations mandated by the FLSA, EEOC, and the Department of Labor, you will get into huge trouble. You must ensure that all your employees are correctly classified and that your organization complies with minimum wage laws.
Payroll software that quickly generates the report when you need it is essential. It helps make the right decision after taking everything into account. You should invest in software that provides these reports, such as total employee overtime, the company’s total labor costs, and more, in a fraction of a second.

8. Security

Security is essential as when a manager or employer makes a salary receipt, they need sensitive information about their employees. If you invest in payroll software that doesn’t offer enough protection against hackers, you and your employees will face serious consequences. Most companies invest in background verification of employees and service providers to ensure the organization’s and its employees’ optimal safety. Choose a provider that offers appropriate security measures such as data encryption, multi-factor authentication, and more.

9. Mobile Access

Customer support is also necessary, as using payroll software is new for most people. If your employer or employee has a problem with the software, they need someone who can resolve their issue. Having a customer support team allows us to make the payroll system seamless.

10. Customer service

Scalability is an essential aspect of accounting software. Most SMEs need to expand business operations over the period and expect that accounting tools scale up along with it. It is not wise to switch to new accounting software as the business grows and set up the entire accounting process from scratch.

Benefits of payroll software

Some benefits of payroll software include:

  • It offers transparency as it integrates with other lines of business, such as accounting and finance. The transparency of personal costs helps organizations to create timely reports, maintain budgets, and develop growth plans for the future.
  • Paying your employees is time-consuming and complicated, especially when your organization has shifting regulations, new hires, mergers, and acquisitions. However, payroll software ensures that all employees get the right salary on time. It helps you build trust between your company and your employees. 
  • Payroll software is flexible to change. If your organization opens in a new region with different regulations and taxes, your payroll software will automatically incorporate the new rules. 
  • With payroll software, your organization can save hours each month managing employee compensation compared to manual payroll operations. You can use that time for other critical business tasks.
  • Payroll software provides real-time information about the employee’s performance in graphs and charts that executives can easily understand and use to make critical business decisions.

How to choose the suitable payroll software service for your business?

Third-party tools can extend the features of accounting tools and help to make the accounting process more efficient. Some popular third-party integration with accounting tools includes point-of-sale systems, ERP tools, inventory management tools, CRM, payment processing tools, etc.

1. Determine your business payroll needs

Business owners sometimes prefer outsourcing accounting work and need multiple users’ access to accounting data. Some accounting software vendors provide free access to multiple users, while others charge extra to add more users to the system.

2. Comply with payroll legislation

It would help if you thought about all the standard and extra payroll laws your company has to follow. Local, state, and federal tax laws must be followed for a company to make sure its payroll package is legal. By following these rules, your business can avoid losing money by not having to pay expensive fines. It would help if you learned about the payroll laws and regulations in your office’s area. You can read about the significant laws of the Department of Labor.

3. Consider different payroll software options

Accounting tools handle business owners’ confidential data, and exposing this data to someone with malicious intent can be catastrophic. Before enrolling in any accounting tools, it is a must for business owners to check the security measures that vendors provide for the tools. It should be protected with the latest security features such as double-factor authorization, high level of encryption, user-based access, etc.

4. Get a free trial of payroll software

Knowing only features will not help you decide which payroll software is right for your business. You should look for payroll software that provides a free trial to see how efficiently it works for your organization. However, free trials often come with limited features, so try a free trial of more than one software and choose the best one for your business. You can find many payroll companies that provide a free trial of their software.

5. Read through customer reviews

If you are unsure which payroll software provider to choose since they all look decent and trustworthy, try checking the previous or existing customer’s review to get an accurate image of the payroll software provider. You can visit the official website and navigate to reviews. However, if you find large numbers of reviews for a payroll company, you should only consider natural-looking reviews. You can also contact the existing customer to learn about the payroll company and its services.

6. Determine your budget

You should consider a budget for your payroll software, as the cost of payroll software may range from twenty dollars to several hundred dollars per month. Many factors, such as pay runs, base fees, setup fees, taxes and compliance, and miscellaneous, define the cost of payroll software. You should find out how much the fee will be for the subscription to payroll software and for additional features such as mailing, reporting, and W-2 printing. Some payroll software charges check signings, per-envelop stuffings, and direct deposit.

Conclusion

Once you have determined your business payroll needs, choose the right payroll software that meets all your requirements. HivePayroll is an excellent payroll software company specializing in various HR software. It offers impressive features such as cloud-based payroll management, reporting, analytics, and more for payroll software.

Latest Articles

[recent_post_carousel design="design-1"]
× WhatsApp Chat