Page 120 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

Payr oll Best Practices
Link the Payroll and Human Resources Databases
The payroll database shares many data elements with the human
resources database. Unfortunately, these two databases are usually main-
tained by different departments—accounting for the first and human
resources for the second. Consequently, any employee who makes a

change to one database, such as to an address field in the payroll system,
must then walk to the human resources department to have the same
information entered again for other purposes, such as benefits adminis-
tration or a pension plan. Thus, there is an obvious inefficiency for the
employee who must go to two departments for changes; another ineffi-
ciency is that the accounting and human resources staffs duplicate each
other’s data entry efforts.
An alternative is to tie the two databases together.This can be done
by purchasing a software package that automatically consolidates the

two databases into a single one. But the considerable cost of buying and
implementing an entirely new software package will grossly exceed the
cost savings obtained by consolidating the data.
A less costly approach is to create an interface between the two sys-
tems that automatically stores changes made to each database and updates
the other one as a daily batch program. However, creating this interface
may still be expensive, as it involves a reasonable amount of customized

programming work.Consequently,this best practice is a costly proposition
and is usually only done when both computer systems are being brought
together for other reasons than to simply reduce data entry work.
Furthermore, if the two databases are consolidated into a single sys-
tem, the initial conversion of data from both originating systems into
the new one can be a major operation: Someone must design an auto-
mated conversion program that shifts the old data into the format used
by the new system,merge the data from both databases,and then import
them into the new system. Also, the new system will probably have a

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