Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

17–14. Post Payroll Remittances on Company Intranet

A company can post payroll remittances on a company intranet site. To ensure that employees access their pay information in a timely manner, a schedule of posting dates should be listed in the employee manual or a memo. This approach is popular with those employees having Web access, since they can access payroll information from anywhere—at work, at home, or on the road. It has the additional advantage of providing employees with pay information for any time period they want; an employee just selects from a list of previous pay dates to view the details for that paycheck.

Though an elegant solution to the issue of getting payroll information into the hands of employees in a cost-effective manner, this approach also presents the following challenges:

• Account security. Each employee must be issued a user ID and password, and the intranet site must have high-quality security to prevent hackers from accessing key payroll information.

• General employee access. Though it is technically up to the employees to find their own access to the intranet site, the company should recognize that some employees do not have access of any kind, and provide terminals and printers at company locations to resolve this need.

• Posting from payroll system. The process of posting to the intranet site should be an automated one, and so will likely require a custom interface from the payroll system.

• Outsourced payroll. If a third-party supplier processes payroll, ...