3 of the Best HRMS Payroll Workflows

Payroll management can be an expensive budgetary element. A modern HRMS helps to drive down costs through automation. The American Payroll Association calculates that such improvements can reduce processing costs by up to 80%. Your HRMS holds the key to power this automation. Read on for some examples of HRMS payroll workflows that make the grade.

1) I-9 Forms

The I-9 process requires an employer to establish U.S. employment eligibility for each new hire. Prior to paying an employee, some checks must be performed. In the pre-HRMS days - as well as the modern day in some companies - an employee would fill out a paper form, the employer would photocopy various documents and everything would be filed away in case there was a government audit.

Streamline your payroll processes with this guide to managing payroll with HRMS

With today’s generation of HRMS, however, it’s a different world. A new employee can now log into the HRMS and fill out the I-9 form online. An HR partner then logs on to the HRMS, verifies the original documents and can even upload a copy of them. The entire workflow has date/time stamps and auditing, so it’s easy to flag when new hires miss the three days from hire deadline. Such automation saves time for busy HR professionals as well as reducing the compliance risk through automated alerts as the deadline approaches.

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2) Benefit Deductions

Open enrollment is often a month of close collaboration between the Payroll and Benefits Departments as employees move between programs and plans. The HRMS is the glue that holds everything together, with a workflow that starts with the employee choosing benefits. It ties in the costing to produce a deduction amount when the payroll is ran. Everything happens based on the data being in the HRMS, saving time and cross-checking by both HR and payroll professionals.

Prior to such automation, this was a heavily manual process. An employee would select benefits on paper and HR would translate that selection into a deduction amount for the payroll. Many hours were spent ensuring that everything lined up after the fact.

3) Timesheet Entries

Time entries are a necessary data element, especially for an hourly paid workforce. In earlier days, paper forms were submitted for subsequent data entry. With so many forms and hours, this was an area of risk that required auditing. It is instead better to use your HRMS to capture the clocking in and out times. For those in front of a computer, it’s just a matter of logging into the HRMS to enter hours rather than on paper or another system. In manufacturing environments or where an employee is not in front of a computer, set up an integration from your employee clock system. It will then automatically import the time data into your HRMS where it can be used for the payroll workflow, as well as exception reporting.