Better Payroll Days Ahead with Automated, Cloud-Based Time and Attendance

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thanks for joining us today for “Better Payroll Days Ahead with Automated, Cloud-Based Time and Attendance.” Attendees are still gathering, so we’ll begin in just a few minutes. Hi, and welcome to “Better Payroll Days Ahead with Automated, Cloud-Based Time and Attendance.” If you’re on Twitter, our marketing team will be live tweeting throughout the webinar using hashtag payroll, or you can follow us directly at nettime. This webinar will be recorded and emailed out to all registrants, so if you need to step away or you have colleagues who would like to view the webinar, we’ll have that ready for you tomorrow.
• #3: My name is Jennifer Spencer, and I’m the Director of Marketing here at nettime solutions. I’m also joined today by Reed White who is our Director of Sales. (Reed intro ….)
• #4: REED: In today’s webinar, first we’ll look at some of the trends we’re seeing in the United States as they relate to time and attendance. Next, we’ll explore the benefits of integrating time and attendance with payroll. Then we’ll go through a case study that looks at how automating time and attendance and integrating payroll positively impacted one of our clients. JEN: After that we’ll talk about everyone’s favorite subject: compliance, and then we’ll explain what the implementation process is like for someone who is integrating time and attendance with payroll. Finally, we’ll close with a Q&A session. The question field is accessible to you throughout the webinar, so as questions arise, feel free to enter those directly into the control panel of Go To Webinar and we’ll do our best to answer all of your questions at the end of our session.
• #5: JEN: OK, so processing payroll may not be a day at the beach, but it doesn’t have to be a chore. According to the IRS, 33% of employers make costly payroll errors each year that result in billions of dollars in penalties. Why does this happen? We all know that payroll isn’t just about adding up the hours an employee works over a period of time, multiplying those hours by a rate, and then cutting the employee a check. There is a seemingly endless list of variables to factor in, such as local, state and federal labor law compliance (such as the ACA); PTO accruals; job costing; expense tracking for items such as tips or uniform deductions; and the list goes on and on. Multiply all of that by different pay policies for different groups of employees, and take into account union versus non-union workers, and the payroll process becomes even more complicated.
• #6: JEN: As you know, one of the biggest factors in the payroll process is simply the collection of employee time information. So let’s take a quick poll with those of us participating in the live webinar – How are you currently handing the collection of your employees’ time information? Is your time collection process mostly manual or spreadsheet-based? Are you using a best-of-breed automated solution, like stratustime? Is your time collected as part of an integrated workforce management suite? Or are you perhaps utilizing time tracking functionality within an ERP solution?
• #7: REED: Let’s see how we compare with the national average. According to a 2013 study from The Aberdeen Group, - 32% of US organizations are using a mostly manual or spreadsheet based solution 24% are handling time and attendance as part of a larger integrated workforce management suite 16% are utilizing time and attendance functionality within their ERP solution and 28% are enjoying a best-of-breed automated time and attendance solution.
• #8: REED:Since we are a best-of-breed automated time and attendance solution, we spend a lot of time understanding the true benefits of automating time and attendance. We see benefits every day such as more reliable and accurate data, increased employee productivity, improved regulatory compliance, and decreased burden on one person or one department.
• #9: JEN: Over the course of the last month, we’ve been connecting with payroll professionals and have really tried to understand both the most rewarding parts of their job and the most challenging parts of their job. In both cases, so far the commentary is consistent. When it comes to rewards, payroll specialists feel rewarded simply by knowing that they are making sure their company’s employees are all getting paid appropriately and are able to take care of themselves, their families, and contribute to society. They enjoy working with other people, and love being able to answer complex questions employees have about payroll.
• #10: JEN: As rewarding as it can be to serve a company by ensuring all employees are paid appropriately, the challenges can be extremely stressful and frustrating. Some of the things we’ve heard from payroll professionals are: “My biggest challenge is the lack of backup combined with very tight timelines, as I manage a department of one — ME …” and “When you are getting time sheets and information from every department in your organization, as well as everything else that goes along with payroll, there will be mistakes … and we tend to get ridiculed for the errors that are made …” And even “It’s challenging keeping up with the changes. I’ve noticed the ever increasing reporting, tracking, and compliance issues. Never did I dream that payroll would be so complex …”
• #11: REED: Let’s talk a minute about compliance. If you’re like every other company in the US with at least 50 full time employees, then you’re already preparing to provide healthcare coverage to those employees who are working 30 or more hours per week, as per the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as the ACA. But when it comes to actually administering the benefits associated with the ACA, if your company is still using spreadsheets, Excel-type reports and manual calculations as part of your time and attendance process, then you’ll certainly be faced with highly complicated procedures and, unfortunately, an enormous potential for error. This is yet another reason why so many companies are turning to automated time and attendance. The ACA has become such an important part of our business lives, and we’ve actually created an ACA module that is deeply integrated into our time and attendance software. We took the rules directly from the ACA legislation, and we built intelligent software with the goal of helping you stay compliant. If you’d like more information about our ACA module, we’ll be sending you our e-booklet on the ACA, and you’ll also have the opportunity to schedule a tour of our ACA module with one of our staff.
• #12: JEN: In regards to improving business operations with automated time and attendance, it’s very important that your time solution can seamlessly integrate with your payroll solution. While there are benefits of simply automating time and attendance, that seamless integration into payroll is key. Currently only 66% of organizations integrate time and attendance with payroll. What this 66% understands is that a time and attendance and payroll integration keeps overhead costs down, decreases the amount of manual workforce management transactions, and leads to fewer errors in tracking time worked and handling payroll processing.
• #13: JEN: How connected is payroll to time and attendance? Time and attendance errors represent 36% of total payroll errors. This can be the result of fraudulent time clock usage that comes with what we call “buddy punching,” manual miscalculations that are simply caused by human error, or other general inconsistencies among managers. Studies show that by automating time and attendance, companies are decreased their time tracking error rates by 32%. And, organizations that integrate their automated time and attendance with payroll see a 63% decreased in their payroll processing error rate.
• #14: JEN: We find that organizations that integrate time and attendance with payroll end up spending far less money and use fewer resources to execute their critical human capital management processes. Let’s look at fraudulent time clock usage, for example. The American Payroll Association estimates that fraudulent time clock usage cost businesses 5% of their gross payroll annually. Let’s put this into terms we feel in our wallets. You run a $10 million dollar company and a third of that revenue goes to your payroll. That’s $3.3 million dollars. According to the APA, fraudulent time clock usage would cost your business $165,000 dollars each year. What else could you do with that $165,000 dollars every year? Organizations that are using automated time and attendance and are integrating it with their payroll process can take save those funds and use them to reinvest in their business, to focus on strategic priorities, and to improve their overall business performance.
• #15: REED: Let’s look at a case study from one of our clients who is currently benefiting from automated time and attendance with integrated payroll. One of our current clients has 200 employees — some of of which are salaried, but most of which are hourly. Prior to them automating their time and attendance and allowing us to help them integrate with their payroll provider, this company was simply tracking employee hours in an Excel spreadsheet. The employees had time cards they filled out either by hand or via Excel, and then each manager would manually check each employee’s calculations and coding to ensure that the employees were coding their hours to the correct projects. Also, any overtime hours already served would also have to be manually calculated at that time.
• #16: The company handles payroll on a bi-weekly basis, and the payroll process would take 5 whole days, with one full day of painstakingly inputting hours into their payroll system. All of this work required one full-time staff member who frequently worked well over 40 hours per week just to process the company’s payroll, correct errors, and make necessary adjustments.
• #17: Now that our client is using automated time and attendance integrated with payroll, their company’s payroll process takes half the amount of time it used to take. Now instead of one full-time employee spending an entire day manually inputting hours into their payroll system, all the data is exported from stratustime into their payroll system in under 5 minutes. This boost in productivity has allowed that one employee the opportunity to take on other administrative duties, which has improved her workplace happiness, kept her more engaged, and ultimately has reduced expenses for the company.
• #18: JEN: I’d like to take a minute now to explain what the process is like when you implement an automated time and attendance solution. At nettime solutions, you are assigned an implementation specialist who serves as your key contact from the moment you become a customer, until you and your team are comfortable and confident with your new system. The most important thing you’ll do with your implementation specialist is identify all of the customizable configuration points that your company requires. You’ll identify things such as payroll policies, pay types and pay adjustments, shift differentials, exceptions and alerts, all company holidays, various labor levels within your organization, any security features you’d like to enable, as well as other scheduling, hardware and preference policies. It may sound daunting, but our implementation specialists do this every day, and their job is to make sure that all of your needs are met and that the system is able to support you (and not the other way around).
• #19: JEN: For payroll specifically, we’ll help you identify things like What day of the week does your work week start on to calculate overtime? What is the pay period frequency of your pay group, and if this is a 9/80 pay period, at what time does the day split to start the new pay period? Do you need to split shifts at midnight, and if so, on what days of the week do you want the split to occur? We’ll also inquire about your rounding rules, if you use schedule rounding rules or standard rounding rules, and we’ll need to understand your company’s overtime rules for each pay policy group — meaning are your overtime rules based daily, weekly, or is there a flat rate. These are just a small sampling of the types of questions your implementation specialist will review with you. The key takeaway here is that the experience is extremely thorough and is managed by a specialist who understands both your business and the time & attendance and payroll industry.
• #20: JEN: Simultaneous to your configuration, the development team at nettime solutions will put in place your required integrations. Many of our clients have us pull employee data from an HR system, and then stratustime transfers payroll data into a payroll system. We’re proud to share that we’ve already built integrations with over 90 different payroll and HR companies, so whether you’re looking for file-based import and export functions, or you’d like a web service API that automatically exports your data with no manual labor required, our time and attendance software is already equipped to handle integration with nearly any payroll or other HR software platform. Or, if you have an in-house system you need us to build an integration into, this can easily be done by our development team, and these integrations can take as little as a day or as long as a week, depending on the complexity of your system. The key message here is that being a best-of-breed time and attendance system, it’s important to us that our software communicates seamlessly with other HR systems. After your implementation specialist and our development team prepares the system to meet your needs, the key staff you identify will then receive system administrator training and/or system manager training, then take you through your actual, live payroll process as many times and you need to ensure you are comfortable and confident in your new system.
• #21: REED: This is our goal. We want payroll processing to feel like a day at the beach, and by automating time and attendance for your company you’ll alleviate stress by reducing payroll errors, time-tracking errors, and processing errors. You’ll also save money for your company by eliminating fraudulent time clock usage and payroll overpayments. With all the money you’ll save your company, who knows? Perhaps a company-sponsored picnic is in store? Maybe there will even be one at the beach.
• #22: JEN: Now we’d like to open the webinar up for any questions you might have. You can go ahead and enter those questions right into Go To Webinar’s control panel, and we’ll answer them as they come in. What’s the cost? How long does it take to implement? How many different types of pay policies can you support?
• #23: JEN: Thank you for joining nettime solutions for “Better Payroll Days Ahead with Automated, Cloud-Based Time and Attendance.” We’ll be emailing all registrants a recording of this webinar, and it will also be posted on our website and YouTube Channel. If you’d like to learn more about stratustime and see if it’s the right automated time and attendance system for your organization, you can give us a call at 1-800-561-6366 or visit us online at nettimesolutions.com to request a customized demonstration. Thanks, and have a wonderful rest of your day!