Payroll processors work hard to ensure timely payments and compliance. They often stay behind the scenes despite being crucial to ensuring workers at all levels receive proper pay. However, educating your staff about payroll processors' roles can help them understand the hard work they put into keeping the company running smoothly.
Payroll Appreciation Week is an opportunity to celebrate these vital team members, shed light on their role in the company's operation, and help employees understand how payroll works.
Let's Celebrate Our Payroll Employees
Payroll Appreciation Week, also called National Payroll Week, is an annual event celebrated in the United States in September. In 2023, it's celebrated from September 5 to September 9.
It's an excellent opportunity for companies to show appreciation for their payroll processing teams and help their non-payroll staff see the intricacies of payroll, payroll taxes, and payroll-related benefits. This knowledge can help your team avoid misunderstandings while gaining more respect for payroll processors.
Understanding Payroll Processing
Payroll processing is a complex set of tactics aimed at compensating employees for their work. Calculating wages and making payments involves withholding deductions, filing taxes, and maintaining HR compliance.
Payroll processing becomes more complex as the company brings more employees on board. With various laws and regulations applying to paying wages and taxes, the payroll processing team must stay up to date with all changes to avoid significant fines.
Employees who arrange payroll processing often feel overlooked and underappreciated – but they are a crucial part of any company's operations. These workers must exercise extreme precision, accuracy, confidentiality, and control. Otherwise, besides dealing with fines from the IRS, the company may face lawsuits from its employees.
Significant effort goes into keeping up-to-date with changing regulations and learning new procedures. These are often viewed as a matter of course, neglecting the effort of the people conducting them.
That's why it's crucial to give payroll processors the time and resources they need to get the job done properly – and respect the efforts they put into it. Showing your appreciation can boost engagement and help these employees achieve top results.
Overlooked Benefits of Payroll Processors
Depending on your business's methods and software for calculating wages, payroll processing can take around five full days each month. That doesn't include compliance monitoring or adjusting to the ever-changing regulations. As your workforce grows, its necessary payroll processing becomes more complex.
Accurate payroll processing is crucial for maintaining compliance and avoiding penalties while keeping employees happy.
Let's dive into the multiple benefits payroll processors provide companies.
Ensuring Accurate Timesheets
Timesheets are comprehensive tools that help your team calculate wages. Errors in timesheets are common, even when companies use special tracking software. While helpful, this technology does not eliminate the possibility of human error.
Instead, that task falls to the payroll processing team to check timesheets for errors. A single mistake could snowball into a serious problem, leading to improperly paid wages, underpaid taxes, and much more. Just one mistake can become an expensive problem for the company and plenty of extra work for the HR department.
Calculating Correct Wages and Payroll Tax Payments
Depending on the number of employees, type of payroll, and available tools, payroll processors can use several wage calculation methods to determine how much each employee needs to be paid.
Taxes are an especially sensitive topic since they require compliance with multiple wage and tax laws. An error in calculating or depositing payroll taxes leads to fines.
For example, companies could be fined for failing to deposit the correct amount of taxes, forgetting to deposit their taxes on time, or not depositing them immediately. As soon as the deadline is up, you start paying between 2% and 15% of the unpaid deposit daily.
Managing Benefits and Handing Deductions
After calculating wages, payroll processors handle voluntary and mandatory deductions from the employee's salary. They can include social security, income taxes, health insurance, dental insurance, and retirement plans.
The payroll processing team can also be responsible for managing benefits to understand which deductions to make.
Implementing and Testing Company HRIS Systems
Human Resources Information System (HRIS) is a type of HR software that can help your team handle various tasks, including payroll, time tracking, and benefits administration.
Payroll processors are responsible for studying, testing, and implementing this system to avoid errors and maximize software effectiveness.
Maintaining Professionality and Confidentiality with Sensitive Documents
Payroll processors can access sensitive documents to calculate wages and ensure correct deductions. They have the skills and experience to keep the data confidential while interacting and discussing payroll intricacies with other team members.
Companies entrust them with their sensitive information and rely on them to handle it with care.
PRemployer Supports Payroll
Handling payroll in-house can be complicated and time-consuming, putting extra strain on companies' payroll teams. However, payroll processors don't need to work alone. PEOs can partner with your payroll staff by providing reliable HR outsourcing to help your payroll team meet your regulatory needs and high-level planning. They can help manage the heavy lift of the workload and train your team with upcoming regulatory changes.
Whether you need someone to take over the entire payroll processing process or want to take advantage of partial payroll support, PRemployer can help. Our goal is to maximize your payroll efficiency, streamline accuracy, and help your company succeed.
