Page 123 - Essentials of Payroll: Management and Accounting

ESSENTIALS of Payr oll: Management and Accounting
case. This is a problem when the payroll staff is asked to sort through
and add up all of the job-costing records, since this increases the work-
load of the payroll personnel by an order of magnitude. In addition, the
payroll staff may be asked to enter the job-costing information that

they have compiled into the job-costing database, yet another task that
gets in the way of processing the payroll.
The obvious solution is to disallow job costing to be merged into
the payroll function, thereby enabling the payroll staff to vastly reduce
the amount of work they must complete, as well as shrink the number
of opportunities for calculation errors. However, this step may meet
with opposition from those people who need the job-costing records.

Fortunately, there are several ways to avoid conflict over the issue. One
is to analyze who is charging time to various projects or activities and
determine if the proportions to time charged vary significantly over
time; if they do not, there is no reason to continue tracking job-cost-
ing information for hours worked. Another possibility is to split the
functions so that the payroll staff collects their payroll data indepen-
dently of the job-costing data collection, which can be handled by
someone else. Either option will keep the job-costing function from
interfering with the orderly collection of payroll information.

Cost:
Installation time:

Automate Vacation Accruals

The accounting topic that is of the most interest to the greatest number
of employees is how much vacation time they have left. In most compa-
nies, this information is kept manually by the payroll staff, meaning that
employees troop down to the payroll department once a month (and
more frequently during the prime summer vacation months!) to see how

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