Yes, your people deserve your attention, but the HR and payroll admin side of the business shouldn’t take up too much of your time, right?

From processing payroll to approving timesheets to managing leave requests , there’s no doubt that HR and finance admin needs to be done.

It’s the ‘how’, not the ‘why’ that makes all the difference. While many businesses have adopted smart tech solutions that are cutting hours off workflows, new research shows there are still manual processes and clunky systems sucking up more hours of time than they need to.

That’s one of the findings in ELMO Software and the Australian HR Institute (AHRI)’s  just-released 2023 HR Industry Benchmark Report, which surveyed 700 HR professionals across Australia to find out their most pressing challenges and priorities. Surveying middle management and above, across industries as diverse as manufacturing, retail, IT and leisure, the report found that on average, respondents spend one day a week on manual HR and payroll tasks. When asked what the most time-consuming tasks were each week, pain points included:

• Onboarding
• Rostering and workforce planning
• Payroll preparation
• Approving and tracking leave

Distributing new and updated policies, employment contracts and filtering resumes also rated high among the tasks people would love to spend less time on. Sound familiar?

Why there’s so much HR and payroll admin

Major culprits that take up HR and payroll admin time include manual processes (hello, endless spreadsheets); paper-based methods for payroll (a third of respondents still do their payroll this way); ensuring compliance with updated government industrial relations and ATO regulations; and poor integration of disparate systems, with no single source of information for all staff. Add the pressures of managing remote workforces and you’ve got a Mount Everest of HR and payroll admin to snow you under.

They’re all tasks that are worthy of attention, but the processes themselves need not be so arduous. If you’ve got rosters here, onboarding there and payroll data somewhere else altogether, it might be time to connect the dots.

The first step to cut hours of admin

First, have a coffee. Second, use an online HR and payroll software system to streamline your processes and shave hours off that weekly admin mountain.

In 2022, the use of HR and payroll software increased by 16 per cent, according to the report. It’s a trend that’s only been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses have digitised faster and discovered how new technology can help clear the admin bottlenecks.

The knock-on effect is that HR professionals and managers can focus on the growing needs of staff, from flexible working to mental health. More broadly, businesses save time, money and resources by integrating HR and payroll into a centralised, user-friendly platform. As a leader in this space, ELMO Software is worth investigating.

How ELMO saves HR admin time

Established in Australia, ELMO is a cloud-based HR, payroll, expense management and rostering, time and attendance software used by thousands of organisations across the country, as well as New Zealand and the UK. Businesses can scale with it as they grow (and the inevitable admin workload grows too).

Streamlining HR and payroll functions in one place is a huge time-saver. The platform brings together your rosters, leave requests and balances, onboarding, training and policy docs, reward and recognition, performance management, recruitment, expense management, payroll compliance and reporting.

It’s self-service so employees and managers can update personal information and manage leave anywhere. The automations help speed up tasks like timesheet approvals, filling out compliance-related forms and generating analytics reports with team data insights. No paper timesheets, manual data entry tasks or spreadsheets needed.

Another benefit of centralised people management is that you get a full picture of the employee life cycle. You can upload wellbeing programs, courses and resources, org charts or anything else that’s needed to keep everyone on the same page.

How ELMO saves payroll admin time

According to those surveyed in the report, the three most time-consuming tasks for payroll professionals are gathering the exact data needed for a pay run; managing, training and developing staff; and payroll policy admin.

But those with an integrated HR and payroll system said reporting takes around 7.7 hours a month compared to 9.1 hours for organisations still using spreadsheets.

By integrating HR and payroll admin into one platform, you can make it a speedier and more seamless process. ELMO’s payroll functionalities eliminate the hassle of managing data across multiple systems, putting your people and payroll management together.

The payroll software ensures compliance with tax laws, accurate record keeping and a higher level of security. For example, the payroll solution is automatically updated with the latest Single Touch Payroll (STP) and ATO regulations, so you never have to second-guess compliance.

Finally, if you need to do extensive reporting for audit, variance, payroll tax and compliance, you can tailor your reporting to whatever depth you need in just a few clicks.

While it may be daunting at first to try a different system or move away from how things have always been done, the long-term benefits speak for themselves. Scale that mountain of admin and reach the summit smarter, faster and whole lot less tired afterwards. Time for another coffee?

Learn how ELMO can help you today.

This article is brought to you by Kochie’s Business Builders in partnership with ELMO Software.

Image: AdobeStock