Payroll insight
The more things change…
Neil Tonks, of MHR’s legislation team, considers whether government demands are inhibiting payroll software evolution
A s a software developer working on payroll systems, I’ve been known to comment that I spend more time working for the government than many civil servants. This is only partly in jest, as the vast majority of the changes made to payroll systems for the past five years or so have been in support of new government initiatives. This is vital work, of course, as a payroll system which didn’t provide its users with a means to comply with the relevant legislation would hardly be an attractive product in the marketplace or have a good customer retention rate. Nevertheless, it does make me wonder just how much further payroll products could be taken if only the government would give us a break from the never-ending tide of legislative changes. Every software developer has a finite amount of resource to devote to the development of our products. To spend this resource in the most effective way, we start with some kind of ‘wish list’ of new features, then estimate their resource requirements and assign a priority to each. It’s then a case of seeing how far down the prioritised list the available resource will stretch. Assuming it’s not possible to do everything (and it never is), it’s then a matter of working out how the best value can be obtained from the available resource. Obviously, statutory changes will come at the top of the priority list. The problem in recent times has been that these have consumed most (or sometimes all) of the available resource. In earlier times, when there was less government-driven work, payroll systems moved on enormously. When I first started working on them, most users interacted with
the system via a terminal which displayed lines of fields in light green text on a dark green background, on which you moved from field to field using the tab key and clicked ‘send’ to submit the record. At that point, any errors were highlighted and you had to correct and resend the whole screen. ...a finite amount of resource to devote to the development of our products Today’s systems, with their multi-coloured, multi-view windows which respond immediately to the entry of a value or the click of a mouse, warning of errors instantly and re-drawing the screen in response to a selection, seem light years away. In fact, it’s only taken twenty years or so to get to this from those old green-screen systems. Good though this is, there is still much to do. All payrolls need to be validated to ensure correctness. Many of today’s systems do this passively. Users run the payroll calculation as a batch job and then spend time going through reports or screens, looking for possible problems. Error logs tell of data issues detected during processing. Comparison reports compare gross and net values this period with a past period and the user goes through them looking for suspicious differences (e.g. why was Jane Smith paid twice as much this period as last?). This operation hasn’t changed much in those twenty years so it’s time it was given attention. What if the system did all this
checking for you, based on your parameters, telling you about possible problems rather than making you search for them? What if it did this intelligently (e.g. Jane’s doubled pay isn’t suspicious if she’s changed her weekly hours from ten to twenty) so people don’t spend time looking for innocent explanations for differences? Accessibility is another area for innovation. The increasing complexity of user interfaces has helped most users but may have disadvantaged people with disabilities. Integration with technologies such as screen readers, voice recognition and other assistive technologies could help enormously in making sure everyone can enjoy the advanced features which are now possible. The days when payroll was a job for a dedicated team of people in an office are on the way out. Home and mobile working is becoming more prevalent, while traditional payroll tasks are increasingly being delegated to others. Systems need to keep up with this trend. Finally, dashboards are another growing area. If you run multiple payrolls, do you have a document or spreadsheet you use to keep track of where each is in the payroll cycle? The payroll system could keep track for you, and alert you via a dashboard when things drop behind schedule. Of course, some systems do some of these things to some extent already. My point is, though, we’d all have a better chance of adding real value to our products if we didn’t spend so much time adding the latest batch of government-driven initiatives to our systems. n
Industry Monitor is sponsored by MHR
27
Issue 22 | September 2016
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker