Sage Pastel Payroll business accelerates in Africa

Pierre Badenhorst, international head of department of Sage Pastel Payroll & HR Africa, says the company is strongly focused on the African continent, outside the borders of South Africa, as economic growth spurred by development and technology enhancements has increased the demand for business software solutions.

“The private and public sectors can no longer rely on manual payroll and taxation systems. Moving to automated payroll software ensures accurate calculations and automatic updating of legislative changes that ensure legality.”

Badenhorst adds that an HR software solution enables management to focus on employee activity and achievement as well as streamlining of staff records, labour issues and disputes, also offering a formal disciplinary process with supporting documentation.

HR software maintains records of verbal and written warnings issued to employees via templates that can be scanned and attached to individual employee files, highlighting the existence of valid warnings and enabling video and audio recordings of disciplinary’ s to be saved onto the software, eliminating paperwork.

Most larger companies have multiple sites and the software enables employee problems such as consistently late reporting for work or shift commitments to be analysed. Such analysis could reveal the source of the problem to be, for example, inconsistencies in adherence to schedules by transport companies.

For larger organisations, with more than 500 employees it becomes a daunting task for the HR manager to conduct all of the employee performance reviews. Department heads need to take responsibility for this and the HR software can provide an overall picture of what is happening to assist management. Departmental heads have unique passwords to utilise certain sections of the software, meaning they only view the employee records that report to them, excluding all financial information.

“The frictionless updates functionality ensures that companies will always operate on the latest version of the software and in line with legislative requirements. This ensures that companies no longer have to install CDs or DVDs with the latest features, functionality and statutory updates, as long as they have an active internet connection,” says Badenhorst.

“It makes sense to select payroll software that offers functionality that will grow with the business and in Africa local software support via business partners is a must. Customers also demand customisation that meets their specific business and payroll needs.

“For example a company may want functionality that controls the allocation of parking bays to employees or highlights areas where the company has made investments in employee benefits. In a nutshell, the capability to integrate systems is a major selling point for payroll and HR software that covers all of the bases with functionality that allows simple, easy transfer of payroll information into HR software and vice-versa, eliminating recapturing of information onto two systems.”

Larger companies want payroll and accounting software to integrate seamlessly and will select payroll software solutions capable of growing with their business. Badenhorst says the Sage Pastel Payroll & HR Africa software solutions operate on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems.

“Other important criteria in the selection of payroll software solutions include ease of use with assistant wizards which guide users through tasks making them simple and intuitive, for example General Ledger Integration Assistant, Payroll Run Assistant, Year End Update Assistant and Performance Review Assistant, to name but a few. Easy installation and ease of use are particularly relevant,” concludes Badenhorst.