It’s that time of year again – payroll year-end is approaching soon, but do not panic! There’s time to put plans in place to prepare your payroll team for it. Read on to find out how to make the complex simple and manage this time of year stress-free.
Year-end payroll processing is an essential part of your annual procedure, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. Business owners and payrollers will experience long hours, static deadlines, and minimal margin for error. Planning is key to success, and payroll year-end preparation should occur throughout the year. We want to make things simpler for you. We provide our customers with year-end documents and checklists for each country, including the dates of public holidays, deadlines and tasks, rates for the new year (where available) to help you budget, details of new minimum wages, and any other new legislation.
This year we have published the Checklist separately from the main Year-End update so that we can get them to you earlier in the process.
Clients can find all our Year-End documents and checklists on our Global Payroll Information portal as soon as they are available.
To support you during this demanding period, we have put together some helpful tips to help you make the process easier.
Successful Year-end Payroll Plan
Knowing where to start is your first step. Closing out your year-end payroll can be all-consuming, and this is where your organizational skills come into play. Order each of your payroll activities by priority risk factor, with each item assigned a goal completion date beside them. This not only allows you to have a holistic high-level overview of all tasks to be completed, but it provides visibility into the deadlines for higher-risk activities. From this, you can manage your calendar and keep clear specific working hours to work with the timeframes you have.
Strategy
Now that you have your activities ranked by priority from step one, create a detailed itemized list of responsibilities that should be completed for each item. As above, include due dates for each required activity. Many countries will require additional reports to be completed, to either file with authorities or must be included in the company’s end-of-year statement. Ensure all these key deliverables are included in your plan, with deadlines and ownership for each activity clearly highlighted.
Execution and Communication
You now have your plan, but what’s next? It’s time to execute the plan, firstly communicating the timeline of deliverables to all relevant parties who you’ll need support from. The key to staying on target is to be precise and allow the time required to complete each task. Remember that obstacles might crop up along the way, so be generous with the time you allot, to allow for flexibility and to be considerate of other people’s time from whom you might seek assistance.
Completion
Once submissions have been completed, you will have finalized your year-end payroll process for another year…your work here is done.
Conduct a payroll year-end evaluation
You might have completed your payroll year-end but remember, lessons learned, and make notes to include in next year’s plans to ensure that you don’t repeat any challenges you came across this year.
Evaluating your processes helps you to identify opportunities for improvement for next year. Save notes and lessons learned so that the process can be improved upon. Audit your year-round plan to keep up-to-date and minimize risk.
Leveraging the right technology to process your payroll can have a crucial impact on your company’s year-end. Cloud-based payroll software that automates processes will help save you time and gives you the power to understand your company’s cash flow better.
Payroll software can also help you stay on top of ever-changing global compliance regulations and legislations so you can reduce risk and conduct year-round internal audits to ensure requirements are on track.
Complete payroll year-end with more confidence and ease. Learn more about how we can support your global payroll objectives and initiatives.
