Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

17–2. Create Employee Self-Service for Payroll Changes

Employees always have some sort of data change they want to make in the payroll system, such as changes to their direct deposit, withholding, address, name, and marital status information. The payroll staff must make all of these changes, as well as the inevitable corrections caused by errors in data entry. For example, when an employee first wants to set up direct deposit, she forwards this information to the payroll staff, who inputs it into whatever payroll software is in use. If the employee forwards incorrect information or it is incorrectly keypunched into the system, it is rejected and must be dealt with again during the next payroll cycle. In addition, employees may switch bank accounts or want to split deposits into multiple accounts—all of which require additional work by the payroll staff. Depending on the number of employees, these types of changes can represent a significant ongoing effort.

The latest advance in the area of self-service is for payroll outsourcing companies to manage self-service Web sites on behalf of their clients, who merely provide a link to these sites from their intranet sites. ADP provides this service, and estimates that a customized site can be operational in as little as 30 days. The ADP site allows the payroll manager to upload a variety of employee-centric documents, such as the employee manual, company phone directory, payroll forms, and news releases. In addition to these basic functions, ...