by FutureLab | 7 Jun 2018
For those of you who have survived the ‘startup phase’ and have gone on to build a successful business, you may be wondering how to take the next step and grow your business.
There are numerous possibilities, but I’m here to tell you about one very important decision that could turn around your business and boost your profits – ‘Outsource Your Payroll.’
Payroll is an essential part of your business, much like sales. It’s not just a monthly task. Payroll is how you reward and retain your employees, compensating them for the work they’ve done. When there are errors due to miscalculation, you’ll wind up with dissatisfied, unmotivated employees.
So why outsource?
Because most importantly, outsourcing payroll saves you time and yes, the occasional compliance headache.
One of the major challenges of payroll is the amount of time and painstaking effort that comes with it. That’s time taken away from your core task of building your business.
When you outsource your payroll, you immediately free up all that time. You can devote that free time to refining sales and marketing and also optimize workflow. The inability to relinquish control and the failure to delegate tasks to manage your time in a better way is a bad business habit you need to give up.
Once this is achieved, you’ll notice overhead costs steadily coming down. As the business owner, the value of your time is linked to the revenue of your company. The time you are able to save each day is money earned.
With that in mind, think about all the time you’ve spent and continue to spend on these payroll tasks every pay period. If you look at the total time you spend on payroll each pay period compared to the costs of outsourcing, you’ll see a great deal of cost savings when you take those tasks off of your plate.
Keeping up with payroll software and technology is equally important. A payroll company is always updated in this regard besides having the expertise in altering compliance laws. It’s not always possible for companies to be aware of these legalities while concentrating on its core competencies. Outsourcing payroll also means aggregating a multitude of other payroll-related info as well.
Some companies, like ours, offer various employee-mobility solutions so that one doesn’t have to worry about hiring contract staff or expats for their offices across the globe. They also manage other payroll related issues such as sabbaticals, maternity leaves, medical leaves, annual bonuses, special payouts and claims.
It’s mostly an all-in-one affair starting right from your employee’s onboarding to filing their taxes, regulating their pay, handling their HR issues and also helping them exit the system when it’s time.
While most corporations accept the many benefits of hiring an online payroll company, the one thing that dissuades them is the issue of privacy. Many companies believe that matters of money and human resource are best left to safe hands. But do you think it’s altogether safe to have it mixed and muddled up along with the many other things that require a careful eye?
Imagine this: You start a payroll department in your company trying to fix A to Z matters of all your employees.
To store all this data you’d need the best software at hand/manage it well from a technological standpoint/ centralise this data/retrieve data at the click of a button/make it accessible even if you are on another system across the globe/provide instantaneous feedback to an employee in another time zone and constantly update payroll software according to the latest in the industry. Not to mention staying updated on tax-related brouhaha every fiscal year. Whine.
Now, think ‘Outsource’. Stay updated, hassle-free, safe, tax-compliant and on the Cloud for anytime-anywhere accessibility. This is where you are not responsible for all the HR homework.
Issues like this crop up all the time. A leading chemical and life sciences company were in the midst of a restructuring move when they had chaos in their HR department.
When they approached Propay Partners in September 2009 they didn’t think that they would be rolling out salaries that month with all the rejig happening. Not only did we roll out salaries, we also streamlined all their HR requirements without any room for nasty surprises. Payments were made on time without any errors and this pleased our client more than anything else.
Another US-based MNC was embroiled in a tussle with their local HR vendor before Propay Partners stepped in.
We were asked to regulate payroll for their workforce in Southeast Asia, a market they were completely new to. Propay Partners transferred their existing employees from the former vendor in accordance with the Labour Law and, in less than a month, successfully handled the on-boarding of all employees.
And this is not all. A professional online payroll service like ours also offers a single team for clients to directly connect to and have their problems addressed. With a somewhat relative human touch to online payroll outsourcing, best software at hand, secure servers and error-free computations, who would say no to outsourcing?
I’d say — Investigate, Commit and Outsource. Become a part of the larger business fraternity.
Written by:
Manish Mehta, Co-Founder of Propay Partners Manish is a frequent contributor for the New Straits Times, SME Magazine, The Edge and others. He has also spoken at seminars organised by the ASEAN Strategic Leadership Institute, Marcus Events and was also interviewed by Business FM radio station. Passionate, energetic, and soft-spoken, Manish is well-loved by colleagues within and outside the company for his highly systematic and process-driven work. Under his leadership, Propay Partners has grown in leaps and bounds and continues to expand in the ASEAN region. To view more of his content, click here.