Many small scale businesses face one common challenge- payroll. As regulations are constantly changing, it takes a toll to manage your payroll.

Besides, this pandemic has created so much chaos in calculating and dispatching salaries. 

It is why experts suggest using business payroll software for easing up the entire process.

Here are five payroll challenges commonly faced by small scale businesses and their solutions. 

• Managing Employees’ Data

Whether your business is small or medium-sized, mostly you have your employees' information in a storage system like a hard drive or office systems. 

The safety of these systems is often questioned. No one can deny the fact that security is a challenge in these methods.

When you want to keep your employees' data confidential, you can't work on manual spreadsheets anymore. As this simple method is easily prone to error, stealing and fake claims, an advanced system is essential.

For this purpose, you need a management system like business payroll software. It ensures

1. Limited accessibility of data to all employees.

2. Employees check their data and not others.

3. Protection of data from outsiders.

4. Salaries and tax information of every employee are aligned.

• Controlling the changes

Dealing with changes is particularly challenging for small businesses. From the manual system to automated business payroll software, the shift is not as easy as said.

It takes extra hours to set up the entire system during the initial stages. However, once it is set, it’s convenient to access the data and process the payroll every month.

In terms of tax filing, you need to be careful with employees’ information. Suppose, if an employee moves towards a different tax jurisdiction, ask for their address update.

It would save you from miscalculating the tax withholding. For this purpose, if you’ve got a self-service portal, you needn’t run behind every employee for data updates.

    Instead, the employees will update the change from their system conveniently.

• Real-time reporting

There were days when finance experts used to predict the payroll factors based on market value. 

Now, you don’t have to strain so much, preferably use a business payroll software to get up-to-date and accurate information.

All you’ve to do is feed your data, and the reports are generated automatically. You’ll get relevant information on

1. Structure of compliance

2. Payment efficiency

3. Audit results

4. Average payroll

• Integration with other apps

Although payroll data is robust, if the software doesn’t have room for integration with other systems, it becomes a manual and tiring task.

The best payroll system must possess third-party app integrations such as time tracker, accounting software and expense tracker to manage the various payroll aspects. 

Since all these factors influence one another, it is essential to choose a payroll that contains all of it or the one that allows effective integration.

For instance, To calculate an employees’ monthly working hours, you need a time tracker to track their everyday working progress.

Some SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) fail to look into these aspects in a payroll. 

• Compliance Management

One of the top concerns of any small scale business is compliance management. Mainly, filing the taxes is a sensitive issue to handle for avoiding penalties. 

Firstly, every calculation must be accurate. Secondly, you must submit the details on or before the deadline. 

All these conditions stress the HR and accounting team to handle compliance with care.

It is well and good to use an automated payroll system to avoid compliance risk. It eliminates errors and ensures each step is aligned with current compliance rules and regulations.

The Bottomline

For every company, payroll is a risky business yet important to tackle correctly. It is wise to invest in payroll software to overcome most of these common challenges.