Outsourcing Your Payroll: a no-brainer

Few things demoralize your work force faster and more severely than for employees to find that their paychecks aren't there on time and in full. Managing the payroll can be a tough task with high consequences if you get it wrong. With the added complications of personnel changes, changing tax regulations, and unforeseeable delays, stress becomes a daily companion.

Over a fourth of all businesses have found that the cure for these headaches was as simple as making the decision to outsource their payroll. Outsourcing makes good sense for many reasons.

Saves on Software Costs
No purchase, installation, support, or maintenance of elaborate payroll software is needed, and the payroll company is responsible for the updates. Payroll companies can interface with your existing office accounting system.

Adapts to Personnel Changes
Growing companies can add new employees seamlessly. For downsizing ones, the payroll company handles the layoffs, unemployment insurance, and severance pay. This scalability is especially valuable for companies that hire seasonal help.

Frees Up More Time
Payroll outsourcing allows you to concentrate on your product or service. In the average business, payroll typically consumes one employee workday each pay period. That's eight to ten hours that could be better spent on enhancing productivity.

Improves Efficiency of Timekeeping
Employees can log their hours directly into the payroll company's data base electronically, eliminating the need for timecards and reducing the chance of human error. Managers retain the ability to approve or adjust the data, as needed.

Accommodates Special Circumstances
One-time bonuses, variable commissions, fines and other irregular payments can all be handled by payroll companies.

Allows Flexibility in Form of Payments
You have the option of distributing paper paychecks or of having deposits made directly into your employees' bank accounts.

Shifts Regulatory Compliance Tasks
If you haven't decided to hire an outside payroll company yet, consider this: Payroll services take on the responsibility of covering shifting tax regulations and mandatory withholdings at the local, state and federal levels. They also manage contributions to health and retirement plans. Hiring an outside payroll company is a good business decision for this one reason alone. But there is yet an additional level of protection in outsourcing payroll. The payroll company, not you, will pay the fines if they are not in compliance with the rules and regulations

Some business decisions are easy. The decision to outsource your payroll is one of them.

Updating the Description of a Job Description

Do you recall some of the early writing lessons you had in grade school? Remember the assignment where you were supposed to describe a dog? The finished sentence went something like, "The dog was big and black." The reader still did not know if, upon meeting the dog, he should prepare to have his face slurped in exuberant friendliness, or if he would be more likely to lose a chunk of his ankle.

Many job descriptions haven't evolved much beyond a third-grade creative writing project. They still read like an inventory of attributes and say very little about what to expect as an outcome. Most job descriptions are duty lists that have been divorced from the esprit of the work.

As "The Staffing Advisor" at wordpress.com laments, "The most accurate part of many job descriptions is 'other duties as assigned.'"

As a remedy, some HR professionals are taking a new look at old job descriptions. They're asking if this old staple of business needs to be retooled to keep up with the times. They suggest that business ought to shift the old paradigm of determining the talent needs by the number of jobs to a new one that is more focused on the output of the work.

It may seem a subtly of language to move from "what should the employee do" to "what should the employee accomplish," but the effect can be profound. It shifts the focus from the drudgery of the work to the achievement of the goal. It redirects the attention away from a list of tasks to a description of performance expectations.

This new orientation will necessarily alter some of the traditional approaches to hiring. Different questions will be asked, and different qualities will be looked for.

Goals and expectations change over time, as do markets and technologies. The new breed of job descriptions will have to be more fluid and adaptable than in the past. For many jobs, an employee's natural talent will become just as important as his honed and practiced skills.

Effective hiring managers consider not only where a company is today, but where a successful employee will help to take the firm in a year's time. In the past, ill-fitting job descriptions confined this forward-looking approach to hiring upper management. But focusing on results is a principle that is not just for the big guys anymore.

Providing Health Insurance Coverage

Question:
What do most Americans consider more important than managing debt or building their retirement fund?

Answer:
Having health insurance! The intensified media coverage of the past year has boosted health care to the number two spot on a list of financial planning issues, according to the 2009 National Consumer Survey on Personal Finance recently published by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards.

The top five concerns are: (1) managing retirement income, (2) providing health insurance coverage, (3) managing/reducing current debt, (4) building a retirement fund and (5) building an emergency fund.

Clearly, having health coverage for oneself and one's family is an important issue for many Americans at all levels of income and education, no matter where they may live or what their gender or ethnicity is. But the report does not indicate what kind of health insurance people want. In fact, many seem willing to trust their employers or others to make that decision for them.

When planning your financial future, it is important that your decisions do not oppose each other. This is an issue where your goals need to work together so that funding one area won't inadvertently cause increased debt in another.