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5 Tips for Avoiding Payroll Errors in the New Year

Whether you calculate your business’s payroll by hand or with the assistance of payroll software, errors are always a threat. While one error is forgivable, more than one becomes a hassle for both you and your employees.

The first and foremost way to avoid payroll errors is to invest in time and attendance software. With hours, sick days, and time off logged in a program – preferably in the cloud – you can avoid any questions when errors do arise. However, once that is done, you’ll still want to follow these five tips to help prevent your business from making some of the most frequent and basic types of payroll errors.

Put a Pay Policy in Writing

One of the easiest ways to avoid payroll mistakes is to write out a pay policy and make it available to your employees. Be sure it includes:

What parameters pay is based on, what factors go into determining a pay raise, and when pay raises take effect within the payroll system.
How your employees can log onto the attendance system online to check hours and fix errors.
How your company deals with payroll mistakes, such as under- or over-payment and what the employee’s responsibilities are in those instances.

Having a policy in place keeps your payroll procedures transparent for you and your employees. Fewer mistakes are made when everyone knows what the policies are towards raises, errors, and other situations.

Classify Employees Correctly

Employees are classified in various different ways, from exempt to nonexempt to contract workers. According to The 8 Biggest Payroll Bloopers, “Classification is important in determining a worker’s entitlement to benefits including health insurance and a retirement plan … as well as determining if the worker is subject to federal income tax or employment tax withholding.” The Fair Labor Standards Act lays out specific guidelines for how to classify employees correctly.

If you classify your employees incorrectly, you may end up paying too much in taxes, be held responsible for back taxes, find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit, or end up subject to Federal or state employment audits.
Don’t give in to the temptation to classify all your employees as contract workers. If their work schedule and pay is comparable to that of a permanent employee, they probably don’t qualify as a contract worker under Federal law.

Prepare the Right Forms

During tax season, make sure that you’re preparing and sending out all of the correct forms required at the Federal, state, and local level. If your employees work in multiple states or localities, you may have additional forms to file.

Don’t forget to send out 1099 forms to your contract workers – and be aware of any changes in the law regarding independent contractors.
Sending in forms late or excluding necessary forms can result in penalties and late fees, so be sure you’re on top of your paperwork.

Keep Up on Payroll Regulations

Payroll is subject to numerous Federal and state payroll laws that affect your business not only during tax season, but throughout the year. Laws and regulations change from year to year, so make sure that your knowledge is up-to-date. Pay particular attention to regulations concerning:

Withholding income tax at the correct rate.
Paying state unemployment taxes.
Child support withholding.
Calculating and properly taxing fringe benefits.

Audit Your Payroll Software

Using payroll software in your business can drastically cut down on the amount of work you have to do to complete your payroll and taxes correctly. However, no program is perfect – and if errors show up in your taxes or employee paychecks, you are the one who will be held responsible.

Most payroll software automatically updates each year with the most current regulations and tax tables. Download the newest tax tables from the IRS website yourself to make sure your software has been correctly updated.

Payroll errors can occur any time throughout the year. You may overpay an employee due to a math error, incorrectly classify a new employee’s tax status, or fail to increase the pay rate of an employee who was promised a raise. Even if you have payroll software, you should double-check that all your payroll paperwork is in order so as to prevent errors this year.

Megan Webb-Morgan is a web content writer for B2B lead generation resource, ResourceNation. She writes about small business, focusing on topics such as business sales. Follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Google+, too!

Online Open Enrollment: Data to Make Your Case

The traditional open enrollment period is a time consuming process that places a temporary, yet significant, burden on an organizations human resources (HR) department. Although some companies have more than one open enrollment period each calendar or fiscal ear, most businesses schedule a single annual event, often in the fall.

Open enrollment provides employees the opportunity to evaluate benefits such as health care, retirement and flexible spending plan− and make changes to their elections. For the employer, open enrollment is an opportunity to modify existing benefits packages to cut costs or increase total compensation values.

Unless a major life event like marriage, a birth or a death occurs, changes made during open enrollment are binding until the next open enrollment period. Because of this, it is important for HR to clearly and efficiently communicate benefit choices that are available. If effective communication is lacking, employee benefit selections can be inadequate, and create frustration for employees. This can breed organizational discontent and reflect poorly on the H department. It may even lead to employee retention issues.

What makes an enrollment period successful?

A successful open enrollment period should educate workers on benefit changes, options and out-of-pocket costs so informed decisions can be made − and enrollment forms processed without errors. If these objectives are achieved, employees will be more satisfied with their choices and H staff can moe on to other tasks. But with manual, paper-based open enrollment processes, outcomes are rarely this rosy or straightforward.

For many of you, open enrollment is still handled in the arduous, and error prone manual method. In the infographic below, you’ll learn what an effective online open enrollment looks like from a data flow and process perspective, as well as eight important facts you need to know about online open enrollment. Use this infographic to help make your case for purchasing an HRIS system so that you can automate your next open enrollment.

A paperless open enrollment process should:

• Increase efficiency throughout the entire open enrollment process
• Reduce the time needed to execute each open enrollment period
• Eliminate handwriting and data entry errors
• Improve employee satisfaction through more informed decision-making
• Decrease costs by eliminating paper and reducing redundant tasks

Learn more about what to online enrollment by downloading Ascentis’ whitepaper “Web-Based Online Enrollment: How a paperless process saves time, eliminates errors and increases employee satisfaction.” Just click here.

Lessons from an unlikely source #1: Football

During a conversation with Lonny Butcher, one of our webinar speakers, we got to talking about the lessons learned from The Wizard of Oz, especially in the HR world. (Lonny had just finished a webinar about that very subject.) He talked about how the Scarecrow’s desire for a brain, the Tinman for a heart, and the Lion for courage all represented the characteristics of a successful HR professional, and how lessons like that can be found all over.

Well, I thought to myself, there can’t be office/workplace/HR lessons learned from ALL over, right? Certainly some things are just what they are: an apple is an apple, an orange is an orange — they don’t represent other things. So off I went to my afternoon gig as a high school football coach. And immediately, things started jumping out at me.

Lonny was right.

So, this is the first in a series of posts where I find lessons from unlikely sources (or, at least, sources that I might not have considered at first).

When we look back at football’s history, we remember more players than teams. Perhaps the most famous team in history is the ’72 Miami Dolphins, the only undefeated team in NFL history. But we can list of hundreds of individual players that have left their mark: Marino, Elway, Montana, and on and on it goes.

But the team aspect of football, and the way we, the audience, watch it, is littered with little absolutes — laws, almost — that turn each team into a winner or a loser. The average audience rarely notices these things, because the average football-watcher is watching the ball — where it goes, our attention goes with it. Some of us recognize that the beauty of the sport is that every kind of offense (the guys trying to score touchdowns) is designed to be run to success against every kind of defense (the guys trying to tackle).

Even if you can’t tell what’s going on in that play diagram, all you need to see is this: the black circle is the guy that gets the ball, and if all the white circles block all the letters, the black circle scores a touchdown, and the entire offense on the field looks awesome. And that play is designed, like every other play in football, to be successful against any kind of defense. But what happens if every white circle blocks the letter they’re supposed to except for one? And the letter that was left unblocked makes the tackle, and the offense doesn’t score?

Watch this play, for example:

In the first three seconds of the video, you can see #43 in white, Troy Polamalu, walking up closer to the ball on the left side of your screen. This is called a blitz — he’s not supposed to be that close; he’s supposed to be back very, very far. Obviously he’s up to something. Now, the big guys in purple are trained to recognize this, and block it appropriately so nothing bad happens. Every one of them blocks a guy as the play starts, except one. Notice, everyone else in purple seems to be doing their job, and doing it well. But someone misses the guy who is arguably the best defensive player in the NFL, and, well, you see what happens.

So what happens in the office when everyone does their job, but one person makes a mistake? Say you work at a newspaper, and you’re the copyeditor. Your job is to take the story given to you by the writer, proofread it, edit it accordingly, and pass it off to the editor-in-chief. Everyone here has a common goal: get a quality story in the paper by tomorrow morning. Obviously, if the writer doesn’t do his job, there’s no story. If you don’t do your job, the story gets thrown in the paper probably with spelling errors, in the wrong format, commas and quotations strewn all over the place like toys in a preschool classroom. (Or an even simpler result: it doesn’t get published.) If the E-I-C doesn’t do their job, well, your newspaper doesn’t run properly or even at all.

Think about it like this: those big guys in purple, that field is their office. They have a job: block the guys in the other color so the runningback can run without being tackled or the quarterback can throw without Troy Polamalu jumping on his back. If even one guy doesn’t do his job, the entire offense can’t function.

So how can this be avoided? Well, this helps:

And while you don’t have all-pro, future Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis there to stare you down, and perhaps some of the jargon he uses in that speech doesn’t quite line up, and maybe you don’t have to be big or strong or fast to make your living, there’s still some useful motivation:

“I prepare so no one can take what is mine: my heart, my mind. To be the best and stay there? Sweat is necessary.”

Always find ways to improve yourself. As you improve, your personal value rises. And as you become more and more vital to the company’s goal, you earn the pride to say, “See? I was a part of that.” And no one can take that away from you.

“I’m older; of course I’m older. That’s the beauty of it. Sixteen years plus. Different level of wisdom, different level of understanding, different level of punishment.”

As you continue to do your job, you encounter different obstacles, some that turn out for the best, some the worst. But those experiences pack your artillery so you’re better prepared for the future. You understand things differently, you see and perceive things differently, you succeed and fail differently. As Ray says, that’s the beauty of it. You’re a different creature than you were last week, yesterday, 5 minutes ago. Learn from it.

“Do whatever you have to do to make sure you chase your legacy every second of your life.”

Reminds me of Alexia Vernon’s August webinar. The statement speaks for itself. Ray asked in another speech, “If tomorrow wasn’t promised, what would you give for today?” Those sorts of questions work for every minute of life, even the ones we spend working.

So, while it’s safe to leave the other 95% of football to tackling and screaming and running and bleeding and tackling again, take lessons from it this season. Watch your favorite teams, and take note of the importance of teamwork from every position on the field. Then, take it back to your office and