by Sachin Bundhoo, ACT-ON Group
Being recently devoted to the role of business partners, HR must provide relevant indicators for the management of the company. The quality of the data at their disposal is important. In most HR processes, including payroll, these data come from the field and are entered by employees and managers on sites at the subsidiaries sides. With consistency and random quality levels. Take for example, the variable elements of payroll.
Payroll and Excel : the difficult relationship
The payroll must be fair, it’s obvious. Otherwise, employees lose confidence in their employer. Companies may also have to pay penalties for errors or delays in their social statements. And the indicators derived from the payroll used to control the activity are no longer reliable.
Whether produced internally or outsourced, the accuracy of pay depends – among other things – on the quality of information captured in the field. Each month, each quarter, each year (as the case may be), various variable elements are thus reassembled – here to pay for overtime, there for an exceptional bonus of results, or for the calculation of the bonus of a manager related to the performance of his team.
Other HR processes use these same variable elements of payroll. For example, they serve to identify employees who receive certain bonuses in mandatory annual negotiation campaigns (NAOs). They can also be used to check whether certain objectives have been achieved by analyzing the variable part of the compensation.
HR processes must therefore be based on accurate, consistent and reliable data. Most of the time, business applications, such as payroll software, use data from Excel spreadsheets. These, often created by businesses independent of the IT, allow an effective data entry closer to the field. But they do not guarantee the quality of the information sent to the HRIS and the different business applications, nor their consistency across the enterprise.
Secure feedback from Excel
The integrator in charge is faced with two alternatives to accomplish a reliable data collection. The first is to specify and design new input interfaces in the HRIS. This assumes specific developments and new habits for the staff. The second is to give reliability to the existing process by best getting to know the knowledge of the people which can take years to achieve.
At ACT-ON BI, we chose the second option, relying on the Gathering Tools solution to secure the reporting of variable elements of payroll from Excel to HRIS or any other HR business application. It’s the simplest because employees will keep their work habits. It is also the most economical solution because the cost of developing new interfaces would exceed that of the tool. This approach also enhances the quality of data collection, since Gathering Tools allows you to control the consistency of the information entered.
Expand to other data and HR processes
Apart from the variable elements of payroll, the method can be extended to all HR processes requiring feedback from the field, and for which the company does not wish to deploy a dedicated tool or develop a specific application.
For example, HR may use it to make the collection of data necessary for the establishment of the company’s CSR reporting more reliable, to retrieve the information that is essential for the production of the ESD, or to carry out employee satisfaction surveys, to ensure a process on an Excel-like form with the control of the data entry.
In conclusion, considered as business partners within organizations, HR produces multiple indicators by combining large volumes of data captured in the field by employees. This evolution – inscribed in the digital transformation of HR – imposes a reliability of feedback processes. This can be done simply, without burdening employees with this change, who continue to provide their data with their usual tools – in this case an Excel spreadsheet.
