Leader in payroll and human capital management software, PaySpace, has updated its software to help customers ‘future proof’ their businesses.
Clyde van Wyk, a director at PaySpace, says all the enhancements and new features are innovative, and ideal for meeting the needs to today’s workforces, which have been largely working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Employees in businesses of every type, and in every industry, are using collaboration tools to manage working remotely, and our solution integrates features to support this. In fact, many of us are in back-to-back Teams meetings, and particularly in companies with a lot of employees, tracking everyone’s whereabouts and schedules becomes nearly impossible.”
He says to meet these challenges, PaySpace created a unique leave calendar integration into Microsoft Teams, an add-on which enables managers and those with the need, to view their entire company’s calendar, to track who is available, and who isn’t, and what employees are up to, which has taken a lot of pressure off managers. The app is available to PaySpace customers and ESS users for free. Moreover, in the next version, staff will be able to apply for leave, file claims and suchlike through the cloud, which simplifies the entire process.
“In fact, in a recent interview, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, says Teams is the company’s fastest-growing business app to date. This was the case even two years ago, way before the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns sent people home to work, ramping up the need for remote working solutions. And as of April 29, Microsoft Teams had a staggering 75 million daily active users, up 70% from just six weeks before. Microsoft saw more than 200 million meeting participants in one day, generating over 4.1 billion meeting minutes,” van Wyk adds.
“All our rewrites on the new software are an enabler. They have enabled us to roll out modules a lot quicker. For example, from a tech perspective, many new rules are still in draft legislation, leaving companies stuck between a rock and a hard place. However, PaySpace was prepared. At the beginning of lockdown, legislation was announced on a Friday, and we had the expertise to able to roll out the changes by the following Monday. This was a major benefit to all our customers.”
According to van Wyk, this is just one of many enhancements to the new software. “For over two decades, PaySpace has made ongoing improvements to its system a priority. “We have more than 6,000 customers in 40 countries, spread across some 65 industries. Three years ago, our development team began upgrading the entire tech stack having conducted a rigorous needs assessment to pinpoint the specific market requirements of a global software vendor.”
“We made the call to future-proof our solution by incorporating Microsoft Azure and Power BI to introduce some really fantastic new features, services, and offerings. In March last year, we debuted our new system which featured all the benefits and more that customers would expect from a modern global cloud payroll and HR system. It was very well received, and our PaySpace Self Service product earned us the GPA 2019 Software Supplier of the Year Award, proving our tech-upgrade was something the market needed,” adds van Wyk.
With PaySpace’s new technology stack user interface payroll operations are significantly more intuitive, easier to learn, and provide instant feedback about the impact of each action. It also offers multi-language support, enabling each organisation’s administrator and employees to log into the system in their chosen language, a highly useful feature as we have customers across Africa.
In addition, he says the company included several new and highly useful dashboards on the home screen for payroll and HR administrators, to give them a high-level overview of the company’s payroll and HR status, including any new engagements and terminations; general payroll health stats – such as changes in bank details in a given period; the number of variances by month; and finally, the number of employees who have not been paid. “These were all aimed at helping organisations identify any anomalies that might indicate fraud or mismanagement in the payroll process.
He says the application programming interface (API) was also overhauled in detail, and in line with global standards, PaySpace has enabled any third-party software to integrate into its system. “In this way, every single one of our screens can be easily integrated with any on-premise or cloud-based service provider, allowing customers to choose the solutions they prefer that meet their unique needs.”
Moreover, the APIs allowed PaySpace to rethink and simplify the way payroll and HR administrators capture data. “In the new iteration, when a large number of records have to be captured, users benefit from an easy-to-use bulk screen with filter options to retrieve, update, capture, delete, and deactivate data. In addition, the company introduced interactive visualisations such as charts and graphs, as well as and Microsoft Power BI to bring real-time analytics capabilities with an interface that is so simple to use, customers can easily create their own reports and dashboards.
Other enhancements were aimed at rapid roll-out, says van Wyk. “Our software now offers a bureau or company representative the ability to add custom fields to any screen. In this way, should there be any requirements for a new country, users do not need to rely on the PaySpace development team to incorporate them.”
Also, a web report-writing tool-set enables PaySpace’s compliance department to write their own legislative reports without having to rely on developers. “Users can create reports with specific headings, field positions, paragraphs, and page numbers, such as contracts of employment, company forms, or general column-based reports.”
Thirdly, a ‘black box’ test was introduced to adapt to the legislation of a specific country, he explains. “PaySpace is able to configure the new changes in a replicated live environment to assess the ‘before’ and ‘after’, to ensure that the results are in compliance. “We see this as a critical testing environment that enables our compliance department to see how functions will behave before they are released in a live environment, where errors would be unacceptable. It is top of mind at all times, that as a provider, we are entrusted with the calculation accuracy of all the statutory components that apply to each country.”
About PaySpace:
PaySpace offers cloud-based Payroll & HR software and services for an increasingly complicated and regulated world. Whether implemented in a SaaS or Outsourced environment, its scalability and configurability allow for any size business to have an affordable, multi-currency, multi-language, yet easy to use solution. As one of the only ISO27001 certified Payroll solutions in Africa, compliancy and statutory reporting in more than 40 countries across the continent is taken care off. More than 6,000 customers, across 65 industries are using PaySpace to accurately process their multi-national payrolls. PaySpace has rich API’s that allow integration with any 3rd party systems. Personalized Self Service further enhances the access anywhere, anytime employee experience.
