Payroll Software- A Complete Guide to Payroll in India

If you are not an expert, you might see payroll as a frustrating, boring, and complex task. However, if you are a business owner, you will have to deal with payroll one day or the other.

Payroll is one of the biggest organizational expenses, and any error or miscalculation in the payroll process may be fatal to your organization financially and to your employees morally.

In this guide, we have explained what payroll software in India is, what is its importance, and many more aspects of a payroll processing system.

What is Payroll Software?

In dictionary terms, payroll is defined as the complete list of employees and the salaries to be paid to the employees.

Now suppose, if any miscalculation or error occurs in the payroll, it may cause a huge financial loss to the company and might affect the employees’ motivation to work.

This concern gives rise to automation – a cloud payroll software. So, what is it?

Payroll software is a cloud-based or on-premise solution that manages maintains and automates the salaries of the employees of a company. A powerful, integrated, and properly configured system can help organizations of all sizes and types maintain compliance with tax laws and other financial regulations.

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Steps involved in completing payroll?

• Onboarding employees to the company

In the very first steps, employers should onboard employees and prepare a list of employees who are to be paid.

• Defining your pay policy

In this step, you should define your payroll policies and get them approved by the management to ensure correct payroll execution. This policy must include leaves and attendance, working hours, overtime, and more. 

• Gather employee inputs

For correct and on-time payroll processing, it is important to collect employee data. This data includes PAN, bank account number, address, and more which is usually collected from the employees at the time of joining.  

• Validate employee inputs

Once the data is collected, check the validity of the details with respect to the company policy, approval models, etc. Also, while checking the validity, make sure that all the active employees are taken into consideration and no ex-employees are added for the salary payments and compliance payments.

The Challenges And Solutions To Payroll Processing?

• Calculate payroll

In this step, the data collected by the employees are fed into the payroll processing system. Once the data is fed into the system, it gives net payments after adjusting all the necessary deductions and tax dues. These calculations are done using spreadsheets which gives rise to calculation errors. However, automated payroll software can eliminate the risk of such mathematical and clerical errors. 

• Disburse employee salaries

Then, companies must make sure that there are enough funds in their bank account to send salaries. Then, the company issues a salary bank advice statement to the relevant bank instructing them to disburse salaries. With automated payroll software’s one-click salary disbursement capability, all these time-consuming activities can be avoided.

• Pay statutory dues

At the time of processing payroll, all the tax deductions like PF, TDS, ESIC, PT, etc. are deducted. Then the company pays these payments to the appropriate government organization with the due dates.  

• Distribute payslips and tax computation sheets

Employees’ tax computation sheets and payslip distribution are also part of this phase. Businesses don’t have to hand out payslips one by one if they have an automated payroll system. Employees can readily access their salary slips by logging into their accounts.

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Need for Businesses to do Payroll

Keeping track of employee pay is an idea that immediately enters the mind. For enterprises, though, the stakes are higher. The impact of payroll on an organization’s net income is significant. Additionally, as a business function, it is governed by a number of laws and rules. Payroll processing and maintaining a perfect payroll record are essential for businesses because of the legal and ethical considerations involved.

Some of the common misconceptions that spread among the employees about your organization include the financial instability of the company and weak and unreliable management in circumstances where they are unable to maintain a clean record.

What are the challenges involved in processing payroll?

Payroll management and administration can be a repetitive and boring task, however, it is not easy to get it done right. There are many challenges that a company may face while payroll processing which may include:

• Coordinating with multiple teams

Payroll team members spend countless hours collecting data from the HR, attendance management, finance, and expense teams. Even the employees of the company submit bills like tax saving records and reimbursement claims. It takes a lot of running after teams to get the information on time every month. And if you are a small business owner trying to do everything single-handedly, payroll is nothing short of overwhelming.

Payroll software for small businesses can help them solve their payroll mess in automated and easy ways.

• Staying compliant with the laws

All statutory computations, including PF, ESI, PT, LWF, IT, Shops, and Establishments, must be taken into account for businesses in India. Any problem with tax remittance or incorrect computation of one of these factors could put your company at a significant disadvantage

• Caring for employees’ morale

Employees expect that their companies would pay them on time for their work and efforts. A small payroll mistake can affect their trust in you and might be a thing that makes them decide to leave. According to a survey conducted by SD Worx – a leading payroll service provider, 44% of the employees consider leaving their company because of incorrect or delayed payments. 

• Depending on legacy methods

You might feel more at ease and at home while using a paper and pen-based payroll processing approach as this is what you are doing from the beginning. However, this method puts you in danger. Papers can be torn, thrown, or even misplaced. This type of manual process opens the door for incorrect calculations and takes up a lot of time.

An immediate alternative – is spreadsheet-based payroll systems. Spreadsheets might ease your work in some ways but do not exactly solve your problem. Spreadsheets seem familiar and easy – but takes a lot of expertise to use them well. Employers who can check your formulae periodically and grasp sophisticated concepts like pivot tables, split fields, concatenate functions, and v-lookup will be necessary if you want to ensure that the calculations are accurate every time. For the system to continue functioning properly, you rely on the knowledge of your team.

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How Cloud-based payroll software can uncomplicate payroll

While the above-mentioned challenges might fear you for once, introducing the right technology can help you to reduce your dependency on traditional methods. With cloud payroll software, repetitive and boring tasks can be automated and complex tasks can be simplified. Below are a few ways a payroll processing system can benefit you:

• Increased efficiency

Typically, a payroll team spends countless hours collecting employee payroll inputs, however, having an integrated payroll processing system helps organizations streamline processes. Software that includes an employee self-service portal allows employers to delegate day-to-day documentation tasks to employees, thereby reducing the time burden. Staff members who work in payroll are constantly stressed for time, which is made even worse by unstructured spreadsheet-based data. The organization of your data and the nicer user interface provided by payroll software make life considerably easier for your payroll team.

• In-built compliance

Payroll Software really shines in the area of keeping up with all the changes in payroll laws. Employers can manage employees’ statutory component deductions such as Provident Fund (PF), Professional Tax (PT), Labour Welfare Fund (LWF), Employee State Insurance (ESI), and Tax Deduction at Source (TDS) based on their pay scale, required percentage, and place of employment more easily with the help of readily available reports.

• Increased accuracy

Payroll software minimizes the possibility of missing out on any payroll inputs. For example, reimbursement bills and tax saving declarations are always included. Payroll computation is automated which eliminates the need to calculate paychecks manually or check the formulas in excel or spreadsheets.

• Effortlessly scalable

Growth is an unavoidable achievement for any business that is running successfully. A system that grows with you as and when you expand saves you the time of looking for alternatives to your previous systems.

• Secure employee self-service

Are you still dependent on paper to collect the reimbursement bills, POI data, and IT declarations? Has it ever happened that you missed any reimbursement bill submitted by an employee? Have you ever messed up a payroll of employees? An employee self-service portal with in-built payroll validation will help you skip all the payroll chaos.

• Powerful administration tools

Payroll is a very vital part of your financial operations, however, exposing the confidentiality to your payroll staff is a strict NO!! Payroll software that comes with an access level functionality helps you assign the right permissions to every employee.

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• Increased collaboration with other apps

An integrated HR Payroll software brings in important HR data for processing payroll automatically. It saves the payroll department to juggle leave and attendance records, reimbursement bills, and more. Additionally, tallying records takes a lot of time. Automated payroll software keeps your accounts organized, and saves you from struggling through numbers after every pay run.

• Decreased cost

Infrastructure acquisition and maintenance amount is a huge part of an organization’s bills. Cloud-based payroll software eliminates the need for infrastructure, thereby resulting in savings for the company.

• Decreased liability

As an employer, it is one of your core responsibilities to get your payroll done right. By implementing payroll software at your workplace and ensuring that the calculations are spot on, you can reduce the risk of liability and your workload.

UBS Payroll – #1 Payroll Processing System for Better Efficiency

Payroll is a crucial function of a business. If payroll is not run correctly and on time, it may ruin the employees’ morale to work in the organization and also ruin the company’s reputation. Payroll software is a go-to option when you are struggling with your company’s payroll operations.

UBS Payroll – A cloud-based payroll software in India is a suite of HRMS software. It is intended to revolutionize the way you’ve handled payroll in the past. UBS Payroll is the go-to option for many companies to streamline their end-to-end payroll operations because it is customized to match the Indian statutory framework and has a refreshingly straightforward user interface.