There are no two ways about it – we live in a digital world. Information is just the flick of a touchscreen away. I even communicate with members of my team sitting two meters away via Asana. Many, if not all of us have embraced the technological era we live in. However, many recruitment and payroll departments are still living in an ink and paper world.

Methods and technology that made sense in 1998 are still in place today – meaning paper. Yes, paper. Paper was invented around 100 BC in China and yet some companies are still using it as their primary communication and admin medium. How is this still a thing in the year 2018? The impact paper has on payroll processing is incredibly damaging and harms efficiency to no end.

If you’re still using paper timesheets you’re also using your General Ledger (GL) for your labour hire payroll. Right? Which I’m sure leads to many throbbing headaches as well!

If you’re completing any of the following on paper then we need to talk:

Paper Timesheets

Right off the bat, a paper timesheet creates additional work for you when chasing submissions from employees come deadline. Ensuring they’re legible is another task in itself. In addition, ensuring the approver has approved the timesheet can be just as tough as chasing the employee in the first place!

Paper Timesheet Interpretation

If you process each timesheet individually, interpreting hours worked, which are normal time or over time and calculating if the employee added these up correctly then I shudder to think how long this takes your agency.

Recruitment System to Paper Timesheets

Employee data, personal details, remuneration information, and job details are then manually keyed into your GL via data entry consumes mass time and leads to the risk of serious error. Most of this information has been collected via paper forms as well, no?


GL Payroll

Now you’re entering timesheet data manually into your GL after having calculated the correct pay rates based on the job conditions of each employee. Most likely by now, you’ve double handed your timesheets.

GL Invoicing

Manual creation of invoices based on associated timesheets. Oh boy. Chances are you can only email the paid invoice to one person at a time and attaching timesheets to the invoice means scanning them individually and attaching them to an email separately. A task both not short and not fun!

Reporting

Your GL provides minimal reporting on vital matters specifically related to labour hire, resulting in a lack of transparency about your workforce metrics and which employees and clients are your most valued. Excel might be your friend here but more specific data entry collated from your paper timesheets is probably where you’ll get what you need. Again, more tedious and time-consuming.

If you were to add up the manual hours spent where paper is your primary source of information (or in some cases misinformation) you may be shocked to see how this is hampering your efficiency, staff morale and cost of labour.

On a more important note, should you wish for your business to expand then you’re going to be up a creek without a paddle depending on a manual process to manage your business processes.

Burn those papers (figuratively) and follow the smoke up to the ‘cloud’. Change is hard, but change is a necessity.

Read more about Aurion’s innovative and pain-free cloud solutions here!