No-one really realises how much time and money is tied up with internal payroll operations until they relinquish control of their wages to a standalone company. The investment in person hours, money and knowledge is staggering. So staggering, in fact, that payroll outsourcing is, almost without exception, an easy and highly recommended way to start cutting unnecessary expenses.

The first thing people overlook – often the only thing, but it’s such a big thing that it still has a huge effect on annual expenditure and productivity – when they start weighing the pros and cons between in house and outsourced payroll activity, is the sheer quantity of time wages take up every month. Even a basic brainstorm of the time-heavy activities associated with payroll brings up a kind of ad hoc argument for payroll outsourcing. Holiday pay, sick leave, severance pay- calculating holiday owed in lieu when a person leaves their job. Managing redundancy payouts, seasonal and performance bonuses, mitigating seasonal bonuses according to length of time served. The list goes on and on.

Usually, one or two people in a company deal with payroll. That, in itself, is a bad thing. What happens if both of those people are off sick, or resign, or go on maternity or paternity leave? How are the staff getting paid? One cannot simply put wages on hiatus while someone else gets trained up to fill the tasks. Without payroll outsourcing in place a company can end up in a very sticky situation, stacking up unpaid wage bills that can really play havoc with monthly and annual accounting. That’s a scenario that springs directly from the fact that, commonly, in house payroll is seen as a kind of arcane wizardry only practised by the initiated: when those initiates aren’t there, everything stops working.

Outsourced payroll is done professionally, quickly and always on time. A company that provides payroll services like this will have plenty of highly trained staff on hand, all of whom are capable of reconciling even the most complicated set of pay circumstances properly and efficiently. Sick leave ceases to matter. Payroll outsourcing companies can cover any absence on their part because everyone who works for them is able to take the reins if necessary.

When the payroll is outsourced, all that time spent fiddling with the individual circumstances of each employee is suddenly freed to do other work. Proper company work, in other words: the kind of thing the business was set up to do in the first place. No more messing around with tax codes and national Insurance numbers; no more trying to work out individual pay packets based on the amount of holiday still owed to someone when they left the company; and no more tortuous mornings trying to calculate annual bonuses. All of that is done by the payroll outsourcing concern, leaving the businesses and employees they are servicing to get on, to borrow an old phrase from a once-famous British politician, their bikes and do some real work.

Time is money – money is the difference between expansion and collapse. Why invest so much of both in a service no-one in a non-payroll business are really qualified to do? Leave pay to the experts and let everyone else get on with their proper jobs.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Saving-Money-With-Payroll-Outsourcing&id=4753535