Posted by
Viventium
| July 17, 2023
Compliance is a daunting task for any business owner or administrator, especially for those in facility-based care. Payroll is one area where compliance can be particularly challenging, leaving the door open to fines, penalties, and even employee turnover. However, with the right payroll software, facility owners and administrators can streamline their process and reduce the risk of compliance issues. Since we’re in the business of payroll, we’ve gathered four critical payroll features that you should keep in mind.
This information is for educational purposes only, and not to provide specific legal advice. This may not reflect the most recent developments in the law and may not be applicable to a particular situation or jurisdiction.
User Roles and Security
Customize access, secure your business: empower your employees with tailored user roles! When running a facility, you have access to and deal with a lot of sensitive information every day, including Social Security numbers, home addresses, and pay rates. As a result, it’s essential to ensure that this information remains safe and protected. But facility-based care is a unique business with plenty of specific requirements, and these can't be addressed if you’re restricted to using default security roles from a provider. With great payroll software, you can provide role-based access control, enabling you to designate as well as limit specific access to specific individuals so sensitive information is secure. Your payroll software should allow you to create an unlimited number of custom user roles with an in-depth yet intuitive permission system so you can customize access for individual employees. With this type of customization feature, you can finely control and tailor access permissions to match the unique needs of your facility and job roles, as no two facilities or job roles are exactly the same. If you have multiple facilities in more than one locality or state, roles with the same title across your facilities might be very different. Your payroll software should recognize this and provide you with full control over customizing roles to meet your specific needs. This way, you can ensure that the access granted to each employee aligns with their responsibilities and the requirements of that particular facility. Besides granting access based on roles, audit trails should also be available to track changes made within your software. This feature lets you see who made changes, what changes were made, and when. Audit trails increase accountability and transparency, enabling any discrepancies that may arise to be detected and resolved quickly. By having a clear record of all actions taken within your payroll software, you can maintain a high level of data integrity and safeguard against unauthorized access or alterations.Retroactive Pay
Unlock the power of payroll past: empower your business and maximize efficiency! In facility-based care, staff members may forget to log their working hours, resulting in missed hours on their paychecks. To correct this, retroactive pay enables employers to pay employees for missed hours in previous pay periods accurately. Suppose an employee forgets to log eight hours during a pay period, resulting in a lower paycheck. If you simply apply eight hours times their usual pay rate, you may miss owed overtime or incorrectly attribute pay to the wrong pay period. This can result in legal trouble or, at the very least, provide inaccurate payroll reporting. Considering how common of a scenario this is for many facilities, you need to be able to count on your payroll system to automate this calculation. Manually calculating retroactive pay is a recipe for disaster, as you may not apply the correct rate of pay or know whether you need to recalculate overtime. Automated retroactive pay ensures that your employees are compensated for missed hours and accurately attributes any overtime to the correct week at the correct rate. This feature helps you maintain accurate payroll records and avoid non-compliance issues that can arise from miscalculated overtime pay.Multi-Rate Overtime
Overtime compliance: Get payroll right and keep the regulators at bay! Overtime is common in facility-based care, as many employees work long hours to provide round-the-clock care for patients. While overtime may be simple for employees paid at the same rate all week, it gets complicated for employees who may receive different pay rates depending on the time of day, weekend differentials, or the type of care being provided. Calculating multi-rate overtime pay can be challenging and time-consuming, making it a prime area for non-compliance. It’s essential that your payroll system can accurately calculate overtime premiums based on multiple rates of pay to avoid disputes and ensure that employees are fairly compensated for their overtime work. Besides fair compensation, compliance with labor laws is also crucial. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) mandates that employees be paid overtime premiums for any hours worked beyond the standard workweek. Failing to accurately calculate and provide overtime pay can result in legal consequences like penalties and lawsuits. If your current software doesn’t automatically calculate overtime with multiple and blended rates accounted for, then you might be at risk of noncompliance and could face potential penalties that can impact your facility’s bottom line.Automated Taxation
Location, location, location! Even in payroll-automated taxation, it makes all the difference. Automated taxation is another critical feature to consider when selecting payroll software. It ensures that you are withholding the right taxes based on the laws that apply to where your employees are working and living. Different states and localities have different tax laws, and it's crucial to comply with all of them to avoid penalties. Non-compliance can take various forms, such as incorrect jurisdictions, under-withheld taxes, and over-withheld taxes. Instead of manually verifying each tax law that applies to your employees living and working in different areas, a great payroll software should handle that for you. Your payroll administrator should only need to ensure that specific state or locality tax rules are set up in the software for all the areas where you do business. Once set up, all your payroll administrator needs to know and input into the software is your employees' work and living locations, and the software should take care of the rest by automatically applying those pre-configured tax rules to each paycheck. This not only keeps your organization compliant and reduces tax errors but also speeds up the process of setting up new employees, saving valuable time. By investing in the right payroll software for your facility, you can save time, reduce costs, and focus on providing quality care for your patients. If you’re interested in learning more about these features and seeing how they work within our software, check out this webinar!This information is for educational purposes only, and not to provide specific legal advice. This may not reflect the most recent developments in the law and may not be applicable to a particular situation or jurisdiction.