Most small to mid-sized businesses keep HR and payroll information separate from the financial system. In the absence of automation, HR professionals manually integrate employee and finance information — mainly in spreadsheets — spending hours entering data numerous times and manually reconciling HR expenses with finance. This causes delays in postings to the general ledger (GL) and hinders period-end close operations, and incomplete records create unnecessary compliance and audit reporting risks.
These delays and inadequate data can significantly impact the bottom line and a company’s capacity to develop and adapt. But this does not have to be the case.
Let us begin by describing some areas where separate systems cause errors and time-consuming, manual work.
Benefits of Unified Workforce and Financial Data
1. Payroll
Payroll and related expenses are among the most significant expenses on any company’s financial statement, if not the most significant. Payroll processing outside your finance system becomes difficult when payroll data needs to be loaded into the finance system for submission to the general ledger (GL). Depending on the quantity of data necessary, this could add hours or days to the payroll process. Furthermore, reports are delayed, increasing the possibility of payment problems.
Once payroll is processed, revenues and payroll liabilities such as taxes must be paid and represented in financial reports. This overall process must be repeated a couple of times every month, with no opportunity for error in payment, tax filing, or reporting.
2. Personnel Records
Updating employment records can be a time-consuming operation. Address changes, for example, are common and appear to be straightforward enough, but if not completed on time, they can create extra work for both HR and finance departments if payroll taxes are deducted wrongly. Without an efficient dated system, tracing the change back to its source may take more time to repair.
Paid time off, on the other hand, is both a benefit to the employee and a liability to the organisation. Not only can gaining the right approvals and maintaining balances up to current create a major job for an HR department, but if balances are not maintained up to date, the company may pay out more in PTO liabilities than is required.
On the other hand, paid time off is both a benefit to the employee and a liability to the organisation. Not only can collecting the right approvals and maintaining balances up to current create a major job for an HR department, but if balances are not maintained up to date, the firm may pay out more in PTO liabilities than required when an employee resigns. Many compliance and audit reports rely on accurate employee records.
3. Workforce Efficiency.
Finance and HR executives frequently discuss worker performance as well as future requirements. This collaboration maintains the company’s two most valuable assets, people and cash, in sync. With workforce information scattered across many systems, compiling the essential data to obtain a unified perspective of worker performance is difficult and time-consuming. So much so that it frequently does not get done at all, allowing leaders to make ill-informed workforce decisions like promotions, headcount budgeting, and spending control. Financial planning for future headcount requirements becomes impossible in the absence of a reliable source of labour information.
Unify, Automat, Relax.
More businesses are relying on a single solution for HR, payroll, and finance. They will be able to automate more HR-to-finance procedures, receive useful insights into employee performance in a single view, eliminate initial and ongoing integration costs, and reduce the time spent preparing compliance reports and audits as a result.
NetSuite integrates HR, payroll, and finance into a single platform, recognising cash and people as equally crucial to business success. HR data is knitted into the NetSuite fabric, giving HR and finance teams access to the same set of real-time data to improve collaboration and speed decision making. Common procedures such as requesting time off, changing addresses, and processing payroll are fully automated, eliminating the need for spreadsheets or additional workers to enter data in various places. Payroll expenditures can update the general ledger in real-time while tax filings are handled for you, saving you several hours of reconciling each accounting quarter. Because effective dates are used throughout one system, it takes less time to generate compliance or audit reports. Employees and managers benefit from secure self-service capabilities, which improve HR service while decreasing administrative responsibilities for the HR team.
A centralised information model also gives more comprehensive views of HR and financial performance, utilising best-in-class KPIs to better understand how the business is performing with no need for spreadsheets, integrations, or manual data imports. Unified finance and human resources data can be utilised to plan and budget for the future workforce. Less data entry, more accurate and auditable records, real-time information, sharper insights, and improved communications benefits full automation.
If you want to flourish in the corporate sphere, you must aim for steady business operations as a business owner. You can’t present a strong face in the market if your organisation isn’t well-managed internally.
If you’re still managing operations manually in this environment of tremendous automation, you’re falling far behind the competition. Because modern issues necessitate modern solutions, it’s time to plan for automation.
A unified solution aids in the analysis of HR and financial capacities. You can determine whether or not these areas are deficient and require improvement. If you want to attain business success while improving the quality of its products or services, make sure your organisation has well-organised operations. When there is insecurity within a corporation, it does not fare well in the market for a long period.
A corporation must have internal stability to show its power in the market, just as a country must have stability inside its borders to have a strong stand on a global stage.
