Payroll Compliance: How To Get It Right With 5 Tips

Payroll compliance is a really important part of your HR or payroll teams’ roles. You need to get it right, not only for you wider teams, but for the benefit of your business, as to avoid penalties that can arise from non-compliance.

To help you with payroll compliance, we’ve put together 5 top tips for getting payroll compliance right:

5 tips for getting payroll right

 
Payroll compliance tip 1: keep accurate records

It’s your responsibility to ensure that your employee records are kept up to date. It can change regularly, so make it part of your HR or payroll teams’ jobs to set reminders about updating employee records which may affect payroll.

This includes everything, down to bonuses, salary increases or any long-term or paid leave, including annual leave or maternity.

Payroll compliance tip 2: keep a documented audit trail

You should be keeping records of all financial accounting within your business, but it can be especially important for payroll compliance to defend your business against fraud and to keep a good check of key financials for reporting.

Payroll compliance tip 3: be transparent with internal processes

To help support your internal teams in remaining compliant, implement and adhere to internal processes and company policies. Whether that’s leave policies, expenses policies or overtime and extended hours policies, by following procedures, your teams can be confident that they’re conducting themselves in a compliant way.

Payroll compliance tip 4: using automation to your advantage and always be on time

There’s nothing worse than repetitive tasks, especially when they’re done manually.

Introduce automation, whether through internal systems or workflows, for helping your staff submit their worked hours, or expenses. It helps streamline the process for your HR or payroll team and means they don’t spend valuable time chasing up employee information.

Payroll compliance tip 5: stay up-to-date with payroll legislation

This one seems obvious, but is probably the most important. Legislation changes all the time, so make it your mission to keep up to date with those changes.

You can do this by keeping up with news outlets, attending webinars and seminars or subscribing to news bulletins to stay informed.