Time & Attendance Nightmares!
I have been ranting about current payroll package nightmares. I have barely scratched the surface!
I have been ranting about current payroll package nightmares. I have barely scratched the surface! Here are some additional points to ponder:
It’s hard to believe that there are some payroll applications where overtime is hard-coded for only a 40-hour week! That’s it, just a 40 hour a week limit! What are they thinking? Overtime calculations vary with state regulations, occupation, union contracts, etc. As an example, some California employee wage orders say overtime is anything over 8 hours a day, 40 in a week, and the first 8 hours if the employee works on the seventh day. Agricultural and Hospital workers have different regulations. Then there are double-time considerations! If you have a union, all bets are off because the labor contract often contains minutia that supersedes everything else. Employees under different wage orders don’t mix, as the system can’t determine proper overtime calculation methods for different types of employment.
Rarely do payroll applications provide a means to import payroll hours from a Time & Attendance (T&A) system. Because of this, interfaces must be written in-house, or, heaven forbid, by the application developer or a VAR. Even then it is never seamless.
Communications between Payroll and T&A must go both ways. I am sick and tired of entering the same information in both systems. After a new employee is created in Payroll the T&A must be updated with his/her name, employee #, supervisor, etc. T&A then determines regular hours, overtime, etc. at the end of each pay period and transfers this into Payroll. In this day-and-age it should be mandatory that payroll applications have tools that will allow users to manipulate data to and from T&A without cumbersome interfaces.
I could go on and on about the current state of payroll applications, but I don’t have the time. If you’re involved with your company’s payroll YOU know what the problems are. It’s time to rise up and demand developers get off their collective tushes!