Implementing a new payroll system is often the subject of a great deal of thought. It is commonly thought that you should wait until the beginning of the administrative year to make such a change. This is a preconceived idea. Find out from us why doing it during the year is both possible and, above all, advantageous.
First of all, the beginning and end of the year – busy administrative periods – rarely seem like good times to make major changes. Your HR department has enough on its plate. However, implementing a new payroll system requires time, precision and a lot of calculations. Choosing to make this transition during a quiet period, i.e. during the year, helps to make it efficient and satisfying. This more comfortable manoeuvre also has a significant technical advantage.
From a technical point of view, this involves recalculating salaries from the beginning of the year. At first sight this may seem tedious and redundant, but in reality it has a number of advantages. Firstly, reviewing previously established actions allows us to audit the set-up and calculations of the customer’s current service provider. It is also an opportunity to correct any misinterpretations by the current service provider of the customer’s payroll rules or the rules set out in a collective agreement; and to validate a new configuration of salary components based on actual production data. The adjustments made will then be directly adapted to meet your needs as closely as possible.
What’s more, implementing a new payroll system during the year allows you to gradually take over payroll management via our Abacus tool (with a few months of parallel payroll processing for our SaaS customers). Customers can also be reassured about the way we set up the payroll and accounting regulations, with mass entries or via third-party application interfaces. Comparing the old and new parameters allows us to validate the accuracy of the figures as well as detect any hypothetical errors in calculation. These can then be rectified immediately.
In conclusion, there are several advantages to changing your payroll system during the year. Firstly, it’s an excellent way of ensuring that no mistakes have been made to date. It also makes it possible to update the calculations so that they are as close as possible to the social security and tax contributions with annual bases and ceilings. The system will therefore certainly be correct for the end-of-year social security and tax returns. A word of advice, however: this exercise has many benefits up until the middle of the calendar year; after the summer it can become restrictive because of the workload and cost it generates.