What Is Payroll?
Payroll is the calculation of payment for work performed by each employee. Payroll comprises of a number of work processes, including the generation of payroll results and remuneration statements, the implementation of bank transfers, and the facilitation of check payments.
What Does a Normal Payroll Cycle Look Like?
During a payroll cycle, there are certain deadlines that must be met:
- The employee has to receive the payment not later than a fixed date (typically, the last working day of a payroll period).
- The tax declaration statement has to be submitted not later than a specific date.
- Based on these deadlines, the entire payroll processing window is defined in a backward termination way.
- In almost all cases, various iterations have to be done in order to get to a correct result.
Typically, these iterations take the form of overnight batch jobs.
- So, what we see are payroll processes that are heavily influenced by a kind of batch thinking mentality.
What makes this way of processing really time-consuming is the following:
- The later in the process a problem is found, the worse it gets as far as the time line goes.
- In this case, you have to go all the way back to the start, fix the problem, and then re-run the whole process.
After all this has been done, someone in a managerial role has to review and sign off that all the data is now in good shape.
