Outsourced Payroll Services

Payroll is essential to any business with employees. It is also a time consuming, and possibly one of the toughest processes faced by employers. In fact, from lodging timesheets to the paying salaries, bonuses and superannuation, payroll can easily become a headache that most business owners could do without. In short, by outsourcing your payroll services, you can focus on the core activities of your business.

Should You Outsource Your Payroll Services?

When a business has multiple staff, completing the regular pay-run can be a costly and time-consuming exercise.  Consequently, an internal dedicated payroll officer with in-depth knowledge of tax regulations may be required to complete the task. This is avoided when outsourcing your business’ payroll as it frees up key personnel, saving your business time and money.

For that reason, Astute Administration Services uses a dynamic cloud-based software to process payroll. That is to say, by using this software, we are able to simplify the payroll process, producing easy to understand reports and pay superannuation and payroll tax at the click of a button. Furthermore, it allows us flexibility to fit in with your payroll procedures, ensuring that you get a tailored experience for your business.

How Can Astute Help Your Business?

At Astute we offer a flexible, all-in-one payroll services tailored to suit your business. That is to say, by incorporating your existing procedures into our process, we are able to bring a wide range of payroll services, including:

• Leave and Expense Management
• Single Touch Payroll – Full ATO Compliance
• Award Interpretation
• Automated superannuation calculations and payment
• Comprehensive reporting
• Seamless integration with accounting platforms
• Employee mobile app
• Employee self service
• Pay conditions engine

Above all, Astute empowers managers and employees to take ownership of their time, attendance, rostering and shift changes. For instance, from accepting and declining shifts to submitting work related expenses, the dynamic self service app, Workzone, allows employees to:

• Log timesheets
• Clock in and out of shifts
• Accept/decline shifts
• View bank information
• Submit expenses
• Submit leave requests and view leave balances
• Access payslips and documents
• View rosters

6 Reasons You Should Outsource Your Payroll

1 – Payroll Compliance

Australia has a complex myriad of laws governing employment at both state and federal level. For example, they cover minimum pay rates, minimum terms and conditions, leave entitlements, public holidays, termination of employment, workers compensation, privacy, superannuation, taxation (including fringe benefits), jury duty and record keeping.

Further to this, a huge focus of Fair Work is payroll compliance. With this in mind, managing your obligations manually gives rise to potentially costly errors. Particularly as the Award system and Enterprise Agreements can be complicated and difficult to navigate, your business needs an expert, using the latest technology to ensure compliance is guaranteed on each and every pay-run.

Outsourcing your payroll to Astute ensures you have access to specialised expertise to not only navigate pay compliance queries, but also advice on best practice for your payroll.

2 – Better Use of Technology

Indeed, business owners often find themselves subscribed to numerous solutions for accounting, rostering, HR and payroll. Moreover, they may only use basic payroll features within their existing accounting software. In other words, they may not be gaining any additional value from product features that exist today in leading payroll software.

Also, changes in technology adds to implementation and training costs for your staff when you process payroll internally – and the resistance to change is often greater.

3 – Risk Management

Furthermore, risks that need to be managed relate to security, fraud and key person loss. Payroll fraud costs businesses a lot of money and can arise in a number of different creative ways such as ghosting, inflating time or rates and redirecting funds.

Unfortunately, payroll fraud is a reality for many Australian businesses, both big and small. Although it’s the larger situations that highlight how payroll fraud is a very real issue, there are many smaller cases going unnoticed. With this in mind, it’s important to create secure systems and processes to ensure that your business doesn’t get stung.

4 – Save Time

Sensitive processes such as payroll management are often responsible for adding significant weight to a single person, or team of people’s, work load when they already have their hands full. When you outsource payroll, you are engaging someone who not only has indepth knowledge, but also uses the best technology, automating a lot of the process. This saves you time on things like payroll admin, double data entry, processing errors, and of course the time spent processing each pay run and it frees up your time to focus on the other responsibilities that come with running a business.

5 – Save Money

In addition to the costs associated with maintaining in-house payroll software, you also have the cost of processing your payroll inhouse (eg. internal payroll officer, salaries and on-costs), ongoing training, administrative overheads and recruitment costs.

Further to this, a recent payroll report states that it can cost a business with under 200 employees approximately $36 per payslip to manage payroll internally. Similarly, small businesses can save up to 75% of their payroll overhead costs by outsourcing their payroll

6 – Minimise Payroll Errors

In short, there are three things that contribute to errors in the payroll process – people, processes and technology. For instance, the majority of payroll mistakes can be attributed to the person processing payroll lacking knowledge, skills and training.

Symptoms of poor payroll processes and systems that need improving include:

• There is a large amount of manual, time consuming work involved
• Likewise, managers and employees complain of errors and delays
• Information is not easily accessible
• Reporting does not provide any valuable insights
• Also, frequently occurring off-cycle payments made to fix errors.

With this in mind, if your payroll processes display any of these symptoms, it may be time to think about how your payroll is processed and whether outsourcing your payroll will work for your business.

How to choose the right Outsourced Payroll Partner

If you have decided to outsource your payroll – then the following can be used as a guide to help you make the best decision in choosing the right outsourced payroll partner.

In short, choosing the right outsourced payroll provider for your business comes down to a few critical factors:

• Expertise
• Proven track record
• Compliance focus
• Technology and features
• Reporting capabilities
• Transparent pricing
• Integration options
• Finally, access to services that drive long term partnerships and expansion with your business.

Questions to ask your potential payroll partner

Once you have found a potential payroll partner, it is important to ask them the right questions to ensure they are the right fit. For example:

• How accessible will your payroll partner be to you?
• What technology do they use?
• What additional support can we expect?
• Also, is the payroll system STP compliant?
• Can they offer any other complimentary services to you?
• What are the service level expectations?
• Lastly, what can we expect to see in the implementation process?

Introducing a third party provider such as KeyPay (CREATE KEYPAY LANDING PAGE TO INSERT LINK HERE) significantly reduces the risk involved for any payroll fraud. Further to this, there’s a number of additional benefits from payroll outsourcing, like reducing time spent on admin and enabling your employees to focus on what you do best.

And so, if you’re looking to partner with a payroll service, contact us today to discuss how we can make payroll easier for you.

Need More Bookkeeping Services

We also offer the following, Click on the link for more information;

• Onsite Bookkeeping
• Outsourced CFO
• Business Reporting
• Offsite Bookkeeping
• Catch-up Bookkeeping

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