Payroll Software Vs Excel: Who Wins?

One of the first questions we ask prospective clients, is how they currently process payroll. Inevitably, for most these clients, we are met with same answers; “EXCEL”.

Our experience is not unique.

In a recent study conducted by Intuit on the use of technological adoption in the backoffice, it was determined that over 90% of Indian small and medium sized businesses (SMB) continue to rely on Excel as their sole employee management tool. This meant, every month, millions of Finance and HR managers across the country were continuing to spend blood, sweat and tears on a process that could be accomplished in a few minutes with a solid payroll software package.

Which leads us to the question in focus; does it make sense for you to switch from excel to a payroll software?

Like most business decisions, the answer to this falls under the “it depends” category.
The first variable is the complexity of your payroll. Do your employees fall under the tax bracket? Are you deducting Provident Fund and ESIC liabilities from your employees’ salaries? Do you have a formalized attendance and leave policy? Is there a high employee turnover? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then the comfort of using Excel is likely not worth the pain you have to deal with when there are errors in your payroll (and yes, there will inevitably be errors).

The key is to use a product that balances the simplicity of Excel and the comprehensiveness of an enterprise payroll software package. At Quikchex, we have built a product that maintains this delicate balance.

The second variable is the resource allocation efficiency within your organization. Modern companies tend to be leaner in the way they structure their organization, with each employee being utilized for maximum productivity and minimum downtime. This leaves less time to be spent by HR, Finance or Management personnel on non-core tasks like payroll management. Spending hours running payroll on excel is probably not the best way to spend one’s time. On the Quikchex platform, payroll managers can run payroll within minutes with a few simple clicks. We love making our clients happy.

The third variable to consider is the culture and composition of your employee base. Any decent payroll software should provide your employees with access to self-service portals. At Quikchex, employees can view payslips, input their investment declarations, apply for leave/expense claims through their portals. This is a highly beneficial feature for companies in which a sizeable proportion of employees have access to the internet, and who are tech savvy enough to log on to their employee portals (such as IT companies for example). Companies with a predominantly blue collar workforce will likely have to continue to issue their employee physical payslips (if any at all), making the employee self-service portal not as beneficial as it would be in an IT company.

Finally, another variable to consider while deciding whether to migrate off Excel, is the size of your employee base. The larger your employee base, the greater the care need to store, organize and back up your employee data. Excel sheets are susceptible to the accidental overwrites, hard disk damages and data corruption risk. At Quikchex, data is stored on the cloud and is encrypted with bank level security. We consistently back up our data in fortress like data centers all across the world. We ensure that once payroll is run for an employee, this data can never be deleted from the system. By organizing your data in a safe, secure environment, we ensure that employee data management is never a worry.