Human Resources System

The Need For Integrated Human Resources Payroll Software

Most big corporations in the world had long felt the need of integrated human resource payroll software solutions that could help them better and effectively manage the HR and payroll functions. Today that is already a reality with many software developers coming out with such an integrated software package. It includes modules on the Human Resources (HR) system and Payroll integrated using a common database.

The software integrates the two modules so that the HR department can view historical data pertaining to any employee's payroll related data. This is difficult to be implemented when different software applications are used for HR system and payroll because the Finance department is always interested in the current data related to payroll. On the other hand, HR is more interested in a historical comparison of an employee's progress in the organization.

HR is interested to compare an employee's progress based on the payroll data when he/she joined the company vis-à-vis similar data of that employee after say a promotion or say five years thereafter. Finance department normally keeps only the current year's database on the company server hard disks. They keep earlier data on tapes, which can be loaded only when required to specifically access old records to find arrears in payment.

So the perspective of the HR department has always been based on the employment angle. The Finance department's angle is to simply process the current month's payroll under a tight deadline with taxation being the additional viewpoint.

Managements of companies therefore always faced issues in the clash of perspective of the Finance and HR departments. This always led to the HR department having to make manual calculations to find an employee's payroll related data on various different dates. Manual calculations led to inordinate delays by the HR department in providing relevant information in respect of the payroll historical data of employees to the management.

Earlier, managements of companies also faced a lack on the part of the two departments to appreciate each other's perspectives. The two departments remained largely indifferent to their different perspectives. The problem was made more complex because the Finance department always worked under tight deadlines to process the current month's payroll so it could not meet with the additional load of HR's requirements.

Integrating the payroll module with the HR system with the use of a common database has largely helped remove the inordinate delays because of single entry of data. Moreover, the entire historical payroll data has been made available to HR. This has led to significant reductions in the time taken by it to present comparisons of an employee's progress in the organization to the management.

Although, human resources payroll software is costly, the above significant time reduction has meant much less headache for managements of companies. Moreover, fewer chasms between the Finance and HR functions have also meant better cooperation between them.