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SfP World Service - An Overview

Welcome

SfP World Service is the flagship offering of Software for People. It is a single integrated HR and Payroll system designed to make tasks quicker and life easier for all who use it. Below you will find information on what we believe a single integrated HR and Payroll system and an explanation of some of the major features of the product. For information on the major application areas of the product please see the items under World Service in the menu, thank you. The Single Integrated HR/Payroll System What is an Integrated HR/Payroll System? What is a Payroll System? Tax & NI Calculations Payroll Processing Calculating Gross Pay So, what does Integration mean? At this point you might be wondering what SfP World Service actually is. The sections below will explain everything. SfP World Service is ... one system a single database a single point of data entry fully internet enabled able to handle multiple payrolls able to work in multiple legislative environments HMRC accredited able to keep full histories able to report on data flexibly highly configurable

SfP World Service is the flagship offering of Software for People. It is a single integrated HR and Payroll system designed to make tasks quicker and life easier for all who use it.

Below you will find information on what we believe a single integrated HR and Payroll system and an explanation of some of the major features of the product.

For information on the major application areas of the product please see the items under World Service in the menu, thank you.

The Single Integrated HR/Payroll System
- What is an Integrated HR/Payroll System?
- What is a Payroll System?
- Tax & NI Calculations
- Payroll Processing
- Calculating Gross Pay
- So, what does Integration mean?

At this point you might be wondering what SfP World Service actually is. The sections below will explain everything.

SfP World Service is ...

one system
a single database
a single point of data entry
fully internet enabled
able to handle multiple payrolls
able to work in multiple legislative environments
HMRC accredited
able to keep full histories
able to report on data flexibly
highly configurable

The Single Integrated HR/Payroll System

What is an Integrated HR/Payroll System?

Before we can answer that we had better ask:

What is a Payroll System?

Most people would say that the three aspects of a payroll system, in order of importance, are:

The Tax & NI Calculations.
The method by which the payroll is processed.
Working out what an employee should be paid.

We will discuss these aspects in the order shown but, as we will show, it is the exact opposite of the true order of importance.

Tax & NI Calculations

Most people assume that this is the important and complicated part of running a payroll. Well, it has to be done correctly but it isn't all that complicated.

The process of converting gross pay to net pay by calculating the amount of tax and NI due is one that can be carried out by hand - thousands of small companies do it that way every week.

The process is well-defined and documented by the HM Revenue & Customs and, although there are quite a lot of rules (which change from time to time), it isn't particularly difficult to perform. Admittedly, some of the information is ambiguous and getting a ruling on what it means from HM Revenue & Customs can be time consuming but, at the end of the day, it's mainly a matter of arithmetic.

Any HM Revenue & Customs accredited payroll system ought to be capable of following the rules and getting its sums right!

Payroll Processing

Assuming that the payroll system can convert gross pay to net pay correctly, we have to consider how the user goes about telling it to do so.

Obviously, the basic principle here is to process all the employees on the payroll and produce a set of payslips and a BACS file but this has to be seen as a less than minimum requirement.

Some of the issues surrounding payroll processing are:

Error and exceptions reports clearly showing which employees were not processed and why.
The ability to re-process individual employees or groups of employees who were not processed correctly the first time, so as to save time, rather than re-processing all employees.
The ability to process late starters or early leavers. That is, people who start after the payroll has been run or leave before it is due to be run.
The production of costing reports and mandatory reports such as the LSC Costing Report.
The creation of periodic and year-to-date totals of every element of pay and the ability to report upon them.
Keeping records of who processed what and when with all the data used in the calculations available for auditing.
The ability to define your own payslips, print them and re-print them (or any subset of them) at any time.
The retention of all the data used for and produced by every payroll run for every period for every year and the ability to report upon it.
Control of every process so as to prevent any process taking place if any preceding processes has not been completed.

All these things have to be accommodated in a clear and concise fashion to ensure that the user knows what stage he or she is at and what to do next. That isn't as easy as it seems. To offer great flexibility without making the processing system too complex requires rather careful software design.

Calculating Gross Pay

This is the bit that most people ignore - because they take it for granted.

Most payroll systems don't help very much here. They work on the principle that "if you want a payment to be made, type in the amount and we'll pay it".

At a pinch, you might be able to set up a repeated payment, like a monthly salary, or even a decreasing-balance loan but, by and large, working out what an employee is to be paid is the user's problem not the payroll's.

In general, the payroll system doesn't have any option about behaving like this because it doesn't have sufficient data stored within it to do any better.

Information about:

what is an employee's salary, when is it due to change and what will it become
what fringe benefits are associated with the employee's contract
what special bonuses should the employee receive for being a First Aider
whether the employee is in BUPA
which pension schemes the employee belongs to and which unions

are all things you would expect to find in an HR system. If all these things were in the payroll system it would be an HR system.

So, the process of working out what an employee should be paid and/or have deducted from the mass of information that exists within an HR system or on a lot of pieces of paper is usually down to the user - doing it manually or using separate computer programs to work it out and then feed it into the payroll system.

For an organisation with a very simple payment structure this might be acceptable but when you add in such factors as:

employee's with multiple jobs and multiple salaries
pro-rating of payments for mid-period starters and leavers
payments by weekly or monthly timesheets (which may have to be authorised)
payments for expenses (which also may have to be authorised)
payments for periods of sickness, maternity etc.

you are asking the user to do rather a lot and if you expect it always to be done correctly, you are probably expecting too much.

So, what does Integration mean?

Fundamentally, it means that if the HR part of the system knows something about an employee (and it should know just about everything about the employee), that something should automatically be available to the payroll part of the system without any intervention from anybody.

To put it another way, since all the reasons why an employee gets paid and the amounts for each reason should be in the HR system, the payroll system should be able, each period, to deduce what to pay an employee without any further data being entered by the user.

Look at it like this. The HR system knows the employee's salary and all his or her benefits. It knows what bonuses the employee should get for extra qualifications or fluency in languages and it knows when the start and when they finish. It knows the employee's working pattern and whether the employee was off sick. It knows whether the employee is paid by salary or according to a timesheet or a bit of both. It knows whether the employee has submitted an expense claim and whether it has been approved yet. It knows whether the employee has a loan (because someone had to authorise it) and what the repayment terms were. It knows whether the employee has a company car and whether he or she has to contribute to the cost of it. All this is information that would naturally come into the HR system because it is all directly associated with the employee or the employee's job/contract/grade.

So when it cones to working out what an employee should be paid, the HR system has all the information needed to do it. Why should that information have to be extracted from the HR system, calculations be made and other information entered to the payroll system? Surely the payroll system should fetch all the information from wherever it is on the database and perform these calculations itself.

What are computers for if you have to do it yourself?

Download our leaflet on "Evaluating Integrated HR & Payroll Systems". You might find it helpful.

one system

SfP World Service is not an HR system and a Payroll system that talk to each other. It is one system that performs all the functions of HR and all the functions of Payroll (and a lot of other functions as well). We talk about the HR part of the system and the Payroll part of the system but they aren't really two parts. It's just that some users will use some facilities of the system and some will use others but there'll always be a lot of overlap. There is no need to transfer data between the two parts of the system because both parts have access to the whole database. The user interface for HR operations and Payroll operations are identical and it doesn't matter whether HR operators put data in or Payroll operators. Once in the database, any information can be viewed by any operator who has the appropriate access permissions. The reporting system can report on any information in the database whether it was input by an operator or created as part of payroll processing.

a single database

All the data in a World Service system goes in to the same database. Currently we support only Microsoft's SQL Server but the software has been written to be database-independent and we could release an Oracle version if we chose.

a single point of data entry

Everything goes into the same database using the same user interface. HR data, Payroll data, Timesheets, Expenses, Absences, Requests for Leave, Grievances, Performance Appraisals - you name it. Whether the data is entered by an HR operator, a Payroll operator, a line manager or an individual employee it ends up in the same database and is immediately available to the system as a whole. This means that you can, for example, have an individual employee enter his or her own timesheet and expense claims, have a line manager subsequently authorise them (or not) and have the amount to be paid (for authorised records) picked up automatically by the payroll. Look at this example of a request for flexible working: The employee can enter the original request. His or her manager will subsequently pick up the request and approve it or reject it. The employee may appeal and the HR department will get involved to settle the dispute. Three people involved but with no duplicate data-entry and no unnecessary paperwork.

fully internet enabled

SfP World Service is a genuine client-server system. The server program handles all access to the database, applies all the security checks and performs any database-intensive operation and runs on a computer in a central location - preferably close to the SQL Server (most commonly, on the same PC as SQL Server). The client program handles the data-entry screen operations and validations and runs on the users' workstations. Communication between the client and the server is via TCP/IP and this means that World Service can operate on a single stand-alone computer or a local-area network or a wide-area network or an intranet or the Internet - or any combination of them. A distributed organisation genuinely can have data entered to the central database from anywhere in the world - HR data, Payroll data or anything else. Furthermore, Payroll processing can be initiated from any workstation (provided that the user of that workstation has the appropriate permissions) or from different workstations for different payrolls and any sub-set of payslips can be printed at any workstation. You can run separate payrolls for different parts of your organisation and still have only one database.

able to handle multiple payrolls

You can have as many payrolls as you like - staff, hourly-paid, directors etc. - and you can use the same data-entry screens for all of them or have different screens if the particular data-entry requirements of a set of employees would make that convenient, For a UK payroll, any or all of the payrolls can be set up to be run weekly, two-weekly, four-weekly or monthly. Each payroll can be processed independently and can result in payslips of a different style.

able to work in multiple legislative environments

The rules by which a payroll system calculates an employee's net pay, tax, NI etc. are determined by the legislative environment under which the employee is paid. SfP World Service was designed to support as many different legislative environments as is needed by the client organisation. At present, we support UK and Channel Islands payrolls (that's three environments because Guernsey and Jersey payroll rules are not the same) but others can be made available on request. When you set up a payroll, you say under which legislative environment it should be processed and World Service will then apply the appropriate rules to all the employees on that payroll. It isn't just rules, of course. Different data will be required for different legislation. For example, Court Orders and Tax Credits exist in a UK payroll but not in the Channel Islands payroll. World Service allows as many new types of database record to be created as are required to meet the legislation.

HMRC accredited

able to keep full histories

Yes we really mean that. Anything in World Service can be held historically although you aren't likely to want to hold a history of everything. As a matter of course (and unlike most payroll systems) a full history of all payrolls, all pay years, all pay periods and all the processing involved with a payroll is held on the single database. At any time, you can look back at the pay details of any employee as far back as you choose to keep the data. That includes: what the employee's tax code was at the time, what court orders, tax credits etc. were in force, what loans were outstanding, which pension schemes the employee was in and what the contribution rates were, what payments were made from timesheets, expense claims, qualification-related bonuses, bank details and so on. At the same time, you can look at all the employee's conditions of service - job, contract, salary, working pattern, absences, etc. as well as all the non-pay related data such as performance evaluation, training, next of kin and dozens of other things. Basically, if you need history you can have it. If only the current value is required then that's fine too.

able to report on data flexibly

SfP World Service has its own built-in reporting system. There are lots of pre-defined reports but you can create as many of your own as you like. The entire database is available for reporting (subject to the access controls placed upon various groups of users) and that includes history records as far back as you choose to go. You can report upon multiple periods of a payroll and even across more than one payroll (again, a most unusual feature). Report output can be displayed or printed or sent to a file for automatic import to another program (such as Word or Excel) or be displayed graphically (pie charts, histograms) or as an organisation chart. You can even output data in HTML format so that report output can be picked up by people who do not have access to World Service at all. If it's on the database, the report generator can get to it and put it out as a properly formatted (font sizes, styles, colours, lines and boxes and so on) report.

highly configurable