Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

17–22. Install Manager Self-Service

A considerable amount of payroll staff time is occupied by the setup and deletion of employees from the payroll database, as well as by the recording of payroll events, such as employee pay raises, transfers, and employee leave situations. Usually, a local manager fills out paperwork pertaining to these events and forwards it to the payroll department, which keypunches the information into the payroll system. This workflow can result in lost or delayed paperwork as well as incorrect data entry. If the events being entered pertain to employee pay raises, an error is also likely to result in boisterous contacts by the affected employee.

An elegant solution is to create an intranet portal through which local managers can enter all of this information themselves, with no need for any data entry by the payroll staff. Since most managers have access to a computer terminal already, there is generally no need to acquire additional computer hardware.

The efficiency improvement resulting from this best practice for the payroll staff is obvious. However, in order to prevent them from immediately converting to error-correction mode for all the errors being made by local managers through the new payroll intranet site, there are a number of enhancements to consider when building the site:

• Install data limit checkers. Managers may inadvertently enter incorrect information that is patently false, such as a $1,000,000 salary, by not entering a decimal place. ...