The Situation
ICT companies have been using outsourced or bureau based payroll solutions for decades,
yet this client ran their payroll in-house and filed returns online to ros.ie. The
client has looked at moving the payroll service to bureau for a number of years but could not justify it for a number of reasons. The main reason was that the time
saved doing this would not have been significant because most of the time taken
was in producing the report that a typical outsourced payroll service requires.
Collating the expense and commission claims from each department was taking the
various managers 4 hours per month, the processing of the payroll itself only took one hour. The client has constantly battled with two challenges
- to maintain the
confidentiality of payroll information and in having to train people on doing payroll.
The Solution
AscenTrust provided a solution which integrated into internal HR or accounts functions.
The manager for each department (Sales, Field Engineering, Help Desk and Administration)
emails each approved time sheet, where expenses and commission (in the case of sales)
is included. The CEO of the company emails any changes from the static HR files
as they occur. This includes leavers, joiners, salary increases/decreases, pension
changes, etc. AscenTrust creates the payroll input using the information sent and
then processes the payroll. Initially, the client wanted to run the two systems
in parallel for 3 months, but this was dropped after one month due to the confidence
in AscenTrust and the time taken to do the payroll in-house.
Outcome
The client is very relieved after the transition in payroll processing due to the
following outcomes:
- Cost savings on internal
salary versus outsourced service cost.
In reality the cost saving here was in opportunity costs, each
manager has an extra hour to two hours each month to focus
on their core responsibilities.
- They no longer needed to own and maintain a PC and software
for payroll which resulted in a saving of approximately
Euro
800.00 per year.
- 90% of staff payroll queries are now handled by AscenTrust,
relieving management from the mundane details of payroll. Staff
satisfaction with payroll has increased, due to the prompt
responses to queries.
- By enhancing the awareness of the employees to understand
their payslips better, AscenTrust identified employees who were
eligible for lower PRSI rates which resulted in a higher net pay
to those people and the elimination of future liabilities for the
company.
- AscenTrust demonstrated its data protection and business
continuity processes whereby all the computers are protected
with encryption and the data is guaranteed to be available even
after any major disaster through a dual backup system with
onsite and offsite backups.
- AscenTrust are currently doing a project with the client to help
them measure the productivity of each engineer. This requires
consolidated analysis of the output from their call logging
software and the payroll information.
