Canadian Payroll Reporter - sample

News Published 12 times a year by Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd. Subscription rate: $179 per year Customer Service Tel: (416) 609-3800 (Toronto) (800) 387-5164 (outside Toronto) Fax: (416) 298-5106 E-mail: customersupport.legaltaxcanada @tr.com Website: www.carswell.com One Corporate Plaza 2075 Kennedy Road Toronto, Ontario, Canada M1T 3V4 Director, Media Solutions, Canada Karen Lorimer Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Todd Humber Editor Sheila Brawn sbrawn@rogers.com Editor/Supervisor Sarah Dobson News Editor Marcel Vander Wier Sales Manager Paul Burton paul.burton@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9928 Marketing Manager Robert Symes rob.symes@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9551 Circulation Co-ordinator Keith Fulford keith.fulford@thomsonreuters.com (416) 649-9585 Payroll Reporter Can R Can R adian adian a www.payroll-reporter.com ©2017 Thomson Reuters Canada Ltd ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-7798-2810-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher (Thomson Reuters, Media Solutions, Canada). Return Mail Registration # 1522825 | Return Postage Guaranteed Paid News Revenue Toronto Canadian Payroll Reporter is part of the Canadian HR Reporter group of publications: • Canadian HR Reporter — www.hrreporter.com • Canadian Occupational Safety magazine — www.cos-mag.com • Canadian Payroll Reporter — www.payroll-reporter.com • Canadian Employment Law Today — www.employmentlawtoday.com • Canadian Labour Reporter — www.labour-reporter.com See carswell.com for information Every procedure should be up for assessment reason to continue doing it. On the other hand, to implement a change for change's sake could cause more harm. In an effort to create better, more effective and efficient pro- cesses, every procedure should be up for assessment and exami- nation. Involve the payroll team right from the start and encour- age them to be creative in solving the challenges, recommending business improvement, and even championing a new process. Besides improving workflow and helping to ensure that tools and technology are as effective as possible, a process overview offers other benefits. These in- clude building improved lines of communication, encouraging collaboration between business units, providing opportunities for learning and training, and uncovering hidden talents with- in the team. A payroll process overview may also bring to light proce- dures that involve other depart- ments. It is a good idea to iden- tify and include stakeholders from the departments, including HR, finance and management, for additional collaboration and transparency, as well as provid- ing a forum to review current practices and highlight future opportunities. Bringing information togeth- er assists in identifying gaps, op- portunities, and best practices from forms, data entries, and data imports and exports, to change management, training, and implementing new features, functionality and automation. Knowing what areas the orga- nization would benefit from the most enables payroll to collabo- rate with other departments and external technology partners to scope out how they can help. When carrying out a process overview, payroll does not have to do it alone. Leverage the ex- pertise of payroll's technology partners when tackling work- flow streams to automate pro- cesses and provide best-industry practices and features. When mapping the processes, inter- dependencies between depart- ments and roles, like payroll, HR, health and safety, training, finance and more come to light, as well as opportunities for inte- gration and simplification. As part of redesigning any of the processes, there are several factors to keep in mind: • Begin by considering current, as well as any future, organiza- tional goals and initiatives so new processes align smoothly and seamlessly. • Include impact on budgets and ongoing subscription fees. • Communication and change management initiatives are vital before, during, and after implementation of any new process to ensure that all stakeholders know what is happening and are comfort- able with the changes. Ensur- ing that all stakeholders are engaged and onboard as part of the process will assist with change management, account- ability, and success. • Timing should be carefully considered when redesigning processes. Internally within the team, it is important not to implement changes when payroll resources are stretched extremely thin, such as during the last and first payrolls of the year right through to the completion of T4s. Managers should also take note of life events and even vacations that may affect implementation. There are also external factors to consider, be it other depart- ment interdependencies or an organization-wide project. • Define what success looks like right from the start and as each milestone is reached, re- gardless of how large or small, celebrate and recognize the accomplishments of everyone involved. Any changes initiated from the payroll process overview will require time to stabilize and produce results. In some cases, especially within the team, a new process reducing duplication of data and errors could realize re- sults quickly and free up valuable resources. Other projects may be better tackled in stages — whether by department or region or even by access. For example, in an effort to promote an organization's green initiative, HR may decide to work towards paperless employee files and payroll may opt to produce and deliver pay statements and T4s electronically. To do this, the departments would review best practices from various technical vendors to consider a web or mo- bile self-service offering. Continuously reinvesting in the payroll process offers many opportunities for the payroll team, the department, and en- tire organization. It will reap re- wards every single time by con- firming which workflow streams are working and driving better, more effective and efficient pro- cesses to save time and free up valuable resources. Implementing additional technological features and max- imizing functionality improves the return on investment to the organization. Improving data flow either with data integra- tion or with even more efficient data synchronization improves data integrity and provides bet- ter reporting analytics. This not only enables payroll to become a more strategic partner in the or- ganization, it also provides excit- ing opportunities. Gladys McCoy is a solution specialist at Avanti Software, a Canadian company that helps organizations manage their HR, payroll and time and attendance with an all-in-one solution. from CONTINUOUS on page 3 Just because a process has always been done a certain way is not a good reason to continue doing it. May 2017 | CPR

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