Payroll Products

Businesses currently are facing tremendous challenges in terms of competition, enhanced customer expectations, pricing pressures and ever-changing business environment. There is a dire need for businesses to concentrate and channelise all their energies and resources on core business functions and crystallize them. By outsourcing the non core business functions, businesses can reduce manpower, free and re-deploy their manpower on core business functions and concentrate on improving their top lines and bottom lines. Payroll processing activity for any company is a sensitive and important and complex function. It requires companies to invest in computer hardware, software, and deploy specialized personnel to manage this particular functional area. Increasing regulatory requirements and compliance thereof combined with rapid technology obsolescence is a burgeoning headache for management. Payroll maintenance and processing involves the personnel of 3 different departments within the company namely Finance and Administration, HR and Technology/ EDP. The activities carried out by the Finance Department with respect to Payroll processing may be the following namely

Payroll maintenance

• Payment services
• Benefits Administration
• Leave Accounting and Administration
• Arears Compilation
• OT, Shift Allocation/ Production incentives
• Loan and Insurance Administration

HR department activities

• Salary Structure formulation
• Union Settlement
• Final Settlement
• Costing/Budgets
• ESOP schemes
• Fixed/Variable DA

Payroll activities

• Data Capture
• Data Warehousing and Reports generation
• Technical Interfaces

In addition to the above stated internal activities, payroll administration has to interface with external agencies such as Income Tax/ Professional Tax authorities, PF/ESI authorities, Insurance providers, Banks, Medical insurance agencies, Gratuity and Pension authorities etc. From the above stated facts, it becomes evidently clear that payroll processing and administration is a complex business activity for any company that involves additional manpower and seamless integration of activities of employees across different departments. Adequate checks and balances, controls, roles and responsibilities to personnel have to be clearly built in for companies to seamlessly integrate the various activities to ensure employee satisfaction. Additional complexities in terms of multi location, multi shifts, contract laborers, penalties for non-compliance to statutory bodies etc would also be present. Further the document and record storage and retrieval, technological obsolescence, dependencies on software vendors complicates the payroll processing activities for any company. Thanks to the advent of modern technology and communication, it is now possible to outsource this routine and complex yet very important activity to credible service providers .For these third party service providers this becomes their core business and hence they have emerged with best practices and quality standards, ensuring confidentiality, security and process efficiency. Since such service providers take the infrastructure and the manpower costs as a common investment for their different clients they are able to provide these services at economical rates. Thus the scenario becomes "win - win" for all players.

Our Methodology

The engagement methodology followed by Antares systems Ltd in the payroll-outsourcing model can be divided into 3 phases namely

A. Client process -transition

Once our marketing team identifies a need from the client side, our transition team consisting of domain experts and technical experts would engage in a detailed study of the existing payroll system of the client. During this study phase, the needs and methodology of satisfying these requirements would be identified. Subsequently this team would submit a detailed document on the execution methodology of the payroll process covering data migration to live run in our system. This document would be the basis for the entire transaction and it would contain details with respect to deliverables, dates for these deliverables, yearend operations, back up and redundancy methodology, security etc. This document would then be handed over to the client for their perusal and modifications. After mutual consent on the execution process, our transition team and the client team would then sign the document. Further during this stage an anchor from our side is identified and this person would be the single window contact for the client with respect to monthly transactions and handling change management.

B. Payroll processing

Based on the signed document, the master details with respect to employees, pay groups, grades etc are collected from the client in a prescribed excel format. This information is then uploaded in our software product by our back end migration team. A parallel run of the payroll for 1 month is done in our system and various statutory and MIS reports are generated from our package. The data from our system is tallied with the existing system (manual or computerized) of the Once the payroll processing commences for the client, the monthly transactions regarding leave for employees, increments, investments, reimbursements, settlements etc would be communicated to the anchor from Antares systems Ltd stationed at the client place. Our back end processing team would do the monthly pay process and submit the agreed deliverables to the client through our anchor.

C. Post sales support

Antares systems Ltd offers customer support for payroll processing activities in two modes namely telephone and Internet. A toll free dedicated number would be provided for our clients to answer payroll related queries.