Clocking in during the attendance consultation session is crucial. Whether your company is implementing a new system or looking to upgrade an existing one, your integration with a payroll system plays a pivotal role in your decision of selecting both a time and attendance and a payroll system. There are, however, various responsibilities to consider when analyzing integration between time and attendance and payroll systems.
Time and Attendance vs Payroll System Responsibilities
Many clients believe that the same company should provide both time and attendance and payroll functionality. Although a few systems offer both modules, it’s important to understand why many separate companies focus on time and attendance or payroll. Before we delve deeper into integration, let’s first explore why these two services are often offered by different companies.
- Most countries, especially in Africa, enforce complex tax and labor laws. Both systems must adhere to these laws and any amendments over time.
- Time and attendance rules and calculations often become convoluted. Factors such as splits into Saturdays, Sundays, 24–96-hour shifts, shift weights, and paid public holidays can complicate matters. Developing such a system proves costly and time-consuming.
- The effectiveness of your time and attendance system directly influences the time and workload needed to complete payroll successfully. Therefore, a robust time and attendance system must excel in performance and accuracy.
- It is crucial to implement a time and attendance system that aligns with the intricacies of your labor laws and payroll rules. Your company must legally enforce and maintain specific regulations.
- Choosing the wrong system will lead to numerous manual data modifications, resulting in wasted time that could be better spent elsewhere.
It is therefore important that when you identified the time and attendance system that caters for your rule requirements, you also must identify whether it fulfils your payroll integration needs.
Don’t miss out on all the features BioSyn has to offer, find out more here.
What is payroll integration?
Before we start to discuss payroll integration, it is crucial to understand what integration truly means. We often have a potential client enquiring as to whether we can integrate with a payroll system, such as Sage, PSIber, PaySpace, SimplePay, and many more. When we ask a client, what do you mean (or understand) by “integration”, 90% of the time the answer is: “Can you export to a specific payroll system?”.
BioSyn also owns the web application development company that develops our time and attendance system. So for our developers “integration” can be interpreted in multiple ways. There can be either (and/or) indirect or direct integration.
Indirect Payroll Integration refers to the process of exporting an XLS, CSV or TXT file from your time and attendance solution and importing it into your payroll solution. Generally, the format of exports has been standardized by time and attendance and payroll solutions. In certain cases, a more unique or customized export file must be provided by the time and attendance provider.
Time and Attendance Integration: Advantages and Disadvantages
Direct Payroll Integration refers to the process of building direct one- or two-way communication between the time and attendance and payroll systems. This is usually done by utilizing APIs (what is an API?). This means that if you perform an action in one system, the data is automatically “pushed” or “pulled” from one system to the other without requiring any manual intervention by the user. This eliminates numerous pitfalls not covered by manual integration.
Advantages and disadvantages of Time and Attendance and Payroll Integration
Indirect Integration
Direct Integration
Advantages
1. A manual export and import action must be performed by a user to complete the export. This creates a strong expectation on the user surrounding accountability and therefore to verify their data before importing.
2. Most export/import formats have been standardised across time and attendance and payroll solutions.
3. Eliminates the need for paper.
4. Reduces the time it takes to complete your payroll versus traditional paper-based options.
1. Only enter data (e.g., employees, leave or
employment histories) once, and the integration will
synchronize the data between the two systems.
2. It eliminates any possibilities for manual data
manipulation mistakes. Greatly improving reliability
of payroll data.
3. Drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to
administrate and export payroll data, often an
improvement by as much as a 1000%.
Disadvantages
1. Leaves room for manipulation of data in-between
exporting and importing.
2. Often requires data to be entered in duplicate, e.g.,
adding employees, leave or employment histories in
both your time and attendance system as well as
your payroll system.
3. Often requires payroll administrators to perform
additional actions by hand.
4. Manual actions can leave room for mistakes and
incorrect salary payments.
5. Can be time consuming with a large number of
payroll batches that require exporting.
1. Integration is greatly dependent on the integration
capabilities of both the time and attendance and
payroll solution.
2. Implementing integration between two systems can
be costly if it is not already done.
3. Integration could possibly be one-way only, forcing
you to utilize one system as your base, and the
other as a secondary source. This could require you
to switch primary data systems when implementing
a new system.
Choosing between direct and indirect integration
In comparison, it is clear that considering indirect vs direct integration should not even be on the table with the aforementioned advantages of direct integration. While indirect integration has a few advantages above a paper-based solution, it cannot compare to the powerful benefits of direct payroll integration. Direct integration eliminates human error as well as a tremendous reduction in the possibility of fraud.
The duplicate entry of data into two separate systems can also increase the number of hours required for payroll personnel to insert and maintain data.
The more employees a company has, the higher their requirement for standard data administration becomes, direct integration therefore also aims to reduce the hours spent on standard data administration. We’ve seen a reduction in payroll administration hours of 8+ hours down to a single hour or two for a small company, and a tremendous 900+ hour reduction in payroll administration for 7000+ employee clients. Not only does direct integration make your payroll run go more smoothly and accurately, but it also frees up the hands of your HR and payroll administrators.
Custom Payroll Integration
One step beyond direct integration is custom integration between your time and attendance and payroll solutions. While custom integration is generally not required, there might be instances where your needs differ from that of most companies. This could include customizations such as unique shift or labour rules specific to your company, custom escalation procedures or advanced modules such as job costing, bonus, or night out hours.
In Summary - Time and Attendance Integration and Payroll
When considering custom integration solutions, it is important to identify the current resource load the requirement has on your company and its employees, and what your potential return on investment would be on the integration and whether the cost would be worth it.
Generally speaking, a well-priced, well integrated system, would save you a tremendous amount of time making the initial payment worth it.
Integration, whether direct or indirect, is the ultimate goal of any time and attendance system. Your measurement on whether it is worth the price, should be based on the ability of the system to reduce manual modifications, and increase the accuracy of your payroll data.
The future of time and attendance systems lie in their capability to integrate directly with payroll solutions, and you should keep this in mind as one of your deciding factors when selecting an appropriate time and attendance solution. The depth of the integration (e.g., employees vs leave and payslip data) should also bear weight in your decision.
Time and Attendance and Payroll Integration Considerations
- Request a demonstration: Ask for a demo of the system’s integration capabilities to ensure it meets your needs.
- Inquire about integration options: If direct integration is lacking, ask the supplier about integration with your payroll solution, including costs and timelines.
- Understand the extent of integration: Clarify the scope of payroll integration and necessary changes to staff workflows on both time and attendance and payroll systems.
- Prepare for implementation: Be aware of and prepared for the changes required when implementing an integrated solution.
Feel free to contact us if you need some advice on how to select the right time and attendance solution and integration partner