One of the biggest steps an organization in the post-acute world can take is opening their second location. It marks a pivotal moment in your business’ story, catapulting it into a completely different world. Like jumping from high school to college, you may still be in school, but the expectations around how you manage yourself are dramatically different. Failing to step up to the new world you’re entering and continuing to operate without adjusting your current management systems is a recipe for disaster.
Of all the processes that need to be evaluated by expanding from a singular to multi-location organization, HR processes are one of the most important. After all, more locations mean more staff, which means that optimizing your HR processes is critical. To that end, the right payroll software can make a large difference in onboarding new staff, providing accurate payroll, increasing scalability, and keeping your sensitive employee data secure.
Better and Faster Onboarding
As your company grows in size, the number of staff being constantly recruited increases along with it. This leaves you with two options: hire more admins to handle the increased volume of new recruits or make your onboarding process more efficient. By switching from a manual to an automated onboarding process, you can drastically multiply the number of new hires that a single onboarding admin is able to handle. Repetitive tasks, such as filling out onboarding forms, signing company policy documents, and collecting basic demographic information, can all be done via a custom phased onboarding system that walks new hires through the process in a controlled manner.
In addition to saving time via automation, a digital onboarding system solves another common issue with organizational expansion. Tracking new hires across multiple physical locations when using a paper-based system quickly becomes a nightmare for admins. As you increase the number of locations, the ability to quickly swap between different divisions and access employee records without having to be at the physical location(s) or log out and log back into the same software under a different user is critical for convenience, simplicity, and time saving.
100% Payroll Accuracy Every Pay Period
Accuracy and timeliness are non-negotiable when it comes to payroll processing. As more employees and more locations become a part of your organization, the complexity of your payroll increases. Automating your payroll process with powerful payroll software can significantly cut the processing time down but also eliminates manual errors. Features such as automated taxation based on location, automated multi-rate overtime, and other admin quality-of-life features are great things to look out for when comparing different payroll software.
The ability to view and manage your payroll processing across all your locations in real-time at once is a must. A “single-pane-of-glass” style dashboard with all your locations located in a single place in your payroll software makes running payroll for a large organization almost as straightforward as for a single location. This level of visibility and convenience makes it easier for admins complete payroll quicker and with less labor required.
Frictionless Integration
Scalability is a key consideration for organizations looking to expand to multiple locations. One of the often overlooked aspects of scalability is how your software handles integrations with other applications you may be using to operate your business, like general ledger or management software. After all, a cohesive operational environment is essential for a successful expansion and eliminates information silos, allowing data to flow seamlessly between different tools.
While you may know that your current solutions all integrate with each other, unless you can somehow predict the future, chances are you don’t know with 100% certainty that you will continue to use every software currently in your tech stack. That’s why one of the most important things to look for when it comes to the scalability of your solution is whether or not your software provides an API that can integrate with other software regardless of if the developers have already created a built-in solution. By doing so, you give yourself the freedom to grow in the future with any software options YOU choose, rather than being restricted by what your software allows.
Stepping Up Security
Your payroll and HR software contains sensitive information about your staff. Personal information, like social security numbers and home addresses, should only be accessible by those who need access as part of their job responsibilities. As a single-location company, this is relatively straightforward; you probably only have one or two admins who handle all HR functions, and they have permission to view sensitive information since managing that is part of their job. But once you begin to expand to multiple locations and have multiple admins performing more specialized jobs or specific admins assigned to certain locations/divisions, things are a little more complicated. The master administrator of your organization needs the flexibility to allow and restrict access to certain parts of your software based on other admins’ responsibilities.
To accomplish this, it’s important to evaluate your payroll and HR software’s ability to create custom user roles as well as how granular the permissions are. Every organization is different and will have people in roles with unique responsibilities that nobody else outside of your organization are able to predict. Flexible solutions allow you to constantly evolve to your growing business, letting you build out and utilize your tools in the ways that work best for you.
No Room for Error
Growth is great, but at the same time, it opens your organization up to the increased likelihood of reputational damage, federal and state legal issues, etc. Using a payroll and HR software that automates your processes not only allows your admins to do more in less time, but it also helps them navigate an increasingly difficult regulatory environment by eliminating human error. As the overall quantity of data that needs to be moved grows with your number of locations, you also create more points of potential failure.
This problem is even more prevalent with security and payroll risks. While catching and fixing issues can be handled internally with onboarding and integrations, payroll and security are notably higher stakes. Errors cannot happen. If you pay people incorrectly, you will be subject to potential fines, penalties, and backpay and serious reputational damage amongst staff who will begin to not trust you to deliver an accurate paycheck.
As you initially embark on the journey of expanding to multiple locations and continue to grow, the challenges surrounding your payroll and HR processes become more pronounced. But with the right tools and strategies in place, you and your administrators can scale your operations with confidence. Ultimately, investing in a robust payroll and HR solution not only helps to streamline operations but also to safeguard against costly errors, setting your organization up for sustained growth and success in the dynamic post-acute care landscape.
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.