The future for Payroll Officers is Bleak

Did you know that you can forge a career out of only handling payroll in medium to large companies?

This is because with WorkChoices dead and buried, our Awards still include Penalties, Overtime, Bonuses, and Allowances based on mileage and engine capacity and Rates calculated on the time of day worked, the State you work in etc. Even terminating a single employee can take a competent payroll operator up to 1 hour to prepare.

These complexities require careful data entry to ensure that employee entitlements are correct. Mistakes can mean crippling fines and disgruntled staff. This is why until recently, medium to large organisations require competent staff that are trained in looking up and interpreting the specific rules of each Industry Award.

Now the good news... Axsapt’s clients typically take less than 30 minutes each week to process their payroll. Complex terminations take only 5 minutes and even McDonald’s Stores with around 500 employees on over 30 awards and hundreds of rates and penalties each week, take only up to of 2 hours per week. Oh and the Payroll Officer for a McDonald’s store is usually the Licensee’s wife!

Not all payroll systems are capable of achieving this type of intelligent processing. Most payroll systems require the operator to still understand Awards and interpret the time worked into rates and penalties. At Axsapt, we have selected a number of powerful solutions that once setup correctly, the operator need only import or type in starting and ending times for each employee and the pay slip is correctly interpreted and prepared.

More information: Axsapt

How do you know if you’re outgrown your accounting system?

Some of the telltale signs are:

• With more people using your system, it seems to be sluggish or in some cases won’t even let 2 people do the same tasks at the same time.
• The types of reports you need as your business grows are not available or you lack confidence in the reliability of the figures.
• You are relying on reports prepared from Excel which are manually input from more than one source.
• Payroll takes more than 30 minutes each week.
• Customers and prospects are recorded and updated in more than 1 location, e.g. Accounting System, MS Outlook and a CRM system.
• You are nervous about fraud as sales invoices have mysteriously disappeared from your system.
  

Consulting

What sets Axsapt apart from many of our competitors is we often act as Independent Consultants, walking through a client’s business, identifying weaknesses and recommending improvements that can be implemented.

In many cases, it's not financially prudent to replace an existing Accounting, CRM or Payroll System when real value can be extracted by implementing powerful reporting systems.

Where the problem is duplication of information (customers and contacts are typically entered in custom subscription systems, CRM and Outlook). A good option may be to implement manual procedures and possibly developing inexpensive middleware that will automatically synchronise data across disparate systems.

As consultants we are mindful of avoiding or at least minimising the significant implementation and training costs accompanying new systems.