Best HR and Payroll Software Features for Enterprise

As companies grow, managing human resources and payroll becomes increasingly complex. The challenges associated with people management and payroll at scale are multitudinous: necessary HR processes become unnecessarily time-consuming; payroll becomes prone to error and delays; tasks like performance management and onboarding become obscured by bureaucracy and admin, and that’s just the beginning!

For payroll and HR professionals in enterprise companies, doing things the same way you’ve always done them isn’t enough. To remain efficient, agile, and competitive, HCM and payroll processes at scale need a little extra help.

That’s where HR and payroll software comes in. Cloud-based, accessible from your desktop or mobile phone from anywhere in the world, and packed with features to streamline tasks, powerful single HR and payroll solutions are a must-have for any enterprise. Let’s take a look at some of the key features of these best-in-class software solutions and how they can be beneficial for your business. 

User-friendly self-service 

Employee self-service is an essential feature of HR and payroll software for any enterprise. With self-service HR software, employees can access and manage their own personal data, such as payslips, tax information, and benefits details, without needing to go through the human resources department. This can save a significant amount of time for HR staff, who no longer need to manually handle employee requests for information, allowing you to break free from those endless email chains and employee questions. 

Moreover, employee self-service also empowers employees by giving them more control over their own information. They can make changes to their personal information, such as contact details or emergency contacts directly within the HR system without needing to get in touch with human resources staff. This can lead to greater employee satisfaction and engagement, as they feel more in control of their own employee data and information.

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Time tracking and management

For large enterprises with many employees and various work cycles, HR software with built-in time tracking and management features is essential. This feature allows managers and HR to monitor employee work hours, track attendance, and manage time-off requests, among other things. With these features, the HR department can ensure that employees are paid correctly, and that all requests around time and leave are processed efficiently.

For example, large enterprises may have hundreds or even thousands of employees, each with their own unique time-off requests. Without a centralised system for managing these requests, HR staff can easily become overwhelmed and miss important requests or even make mistakes when organising leave. To overcome this problem, HR software with time tracking and management features can automate this process, allowing employees to submit time-off requests online, and managers to approve or deny them with just a few clicks.

An HR solution with time tracking and management features can also help enterprises manage compliance with labour laws and regulations. With complex laws governing employee hours, overtime pay, and time off, it can be challenging for HR staff to stay on top of all the requirements. However, with software that includes these features, managers can easily monitor compliance, and generate reports to show that the company is following all relevant regulations.

Feature-rich HMRC-compliant payroll 

For large enterprises, managing payroll can be a complex and time-consuming task. It is crucial that organisations comply with HMRC regulations to avoid penalties and ensure accuracy in payroll processing. An HMRC-compliant payroll system is a must-have for large enterprises to ensure compliance and streamline payroll processing.

HMRC-recognised software automates many of the time-consuming and repetitive tasks involved in payroll processing. For example, the software can automate tax calculations, national insurance contributions, and other deductions, reducing the risk of errors and improving efficiency.

Moreover, large enterprises may have employees who work remotely or have different work arrangements, such as flexible hours or job sharing. HMRC-compliant payroll software can handle these complex payroll arrangements, ensuring that employees are paid accurately and on time.

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Real-time reporting and analytics

Real-time reporting and analytics features are also essential for large enterprises using HR and payroll software. These features enable HR departments to create custom dashboards to access data and analytics in real-time, providing you with greater visibility into workforce trends, challenges, and opportunities. By using real-time reporting and analytics, HR can make more informed and data-driven decisions, creating a more strategic approach to managing the workforce.

For example, accurate and powerful reporting capabilities can help HR manage employee turnover. High levels of turnover can be costly for enterprises, and identifying the root causes of employee turnover can be challenging. With real-time reporting and analytics, HR can quickly identify trends and patterns in turnover rates, evaluating retention and turnover data by department, role type, level, time of year, location, or even manager. With these essential insights into turnover trends, human resources managers can develop targeted retention strategies to reduce turnover.

Similarly, real-time reporting and analytics can help HR departments identify skills gaps in their workforce. By analysing data on employee performance, training, and development, HR can identify areas where employees may be lacking in certain skills or knowledge. This can help HR develop targeted training programs to fill those gaps, improving overall employee performance and productivity.

Another unique challenge for HR teams in enterprises is tracking and creating strategies around employee satisfaction and engagement. While in a small business evaluating the general mood and engagement levels of a team may be easier, in larger companies with many hundreds of staff and possible multiple locations and role types it can be harder to gain insight into how engaged everyone is. For this reason, HR software with real-time reporting and analytics features can be invaluable for keeping a finger on the pulse of employee engagement levels. By analysing data on employee surveys and feedback, HR can quickly identify areas where employees are dissatisfied or disengaged. This can help HR develop targeted initiatives to improve employee satisfaction and engagement, leading to higher retention rates and overall productivity.

Streamlined benefit management

One of the key benefits of using HR and payroll software for benefit management is the ability to manage all employee benefits in one central location. This makes it easier for HR to track employee benefits and ensures that all benefits are allocated and managed correctly. This can include benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, and other employee perks.

HR and payroll software can also help automate the enrolment process for employee benefits. Employees can access and enrol in benefit plans through a self-service portal, which saves HR time and resources. Additionally, employees can use the self-service portal to make changes to their benefits, such as updating their address or adding dependents.

Additionally, HR and payroll software can provide real-time reporting and analytics on employee benefits. This can help HR track usage and identify trends in employee benefit preferences, allowing human resources teams to build strategies to improve employee satisfaction and retention.

Powerful recruitment and onboarding

In global enterprises or large companies with multiple locations, the likelihood is that the HR team can’t be everywhere at once. Bigger companies have greater talent needs and recruiting the right people is a priority, but this takes a lot of time and resources. 

HR software with in-built recruitment and onboarding capabilities is invaluable for enterprises with large scale talent needs and high volume or seasonal recruitment. One key advantage of HR software for recruitment is the ability to manage job postings and candidate applications from a single platform. This can save HR teams significant time and resources by eliminating the need to manage job postings and applications across multiple platforms. HR software can also help HR teams screen CVs and filter out unqualified candidates using automated screening tools, freeing up time for HR teams to focus on the most promising candidates.

For large enterprises, onboarding can be a complex and time-consuming process, particularly when onboarding new hires across multiple locations or departments. HR software can help streamline the onboarding process by providing a centralised platform for managing all onboarding tasks and documentation. HR teams can use the software to automate tasks such as sending welcome emails, collecting and verifying new hire information, and assigning training tasks.

In addition, a human resources information system can also help HR teams stay organised during the onboarding process by providing real-time status updates on new hires and their onboarding progress. This can help ensure that no new hire falls through the cracks, particularly in large enterprises with many new hires.

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Holistic performance management

As we know, effective performance management is critical for any organisation, but it can be particularly challenging for large enterprises with a large number of employees. HR and payroll software can assist in enhancing performance management by providing HR teams with the necessary tools to manage employee performance more efficiently and effectively.

The best software solutions for performance management allow employees and managers to contribute separately to configurable performance review forms, allowing the process to become more collaborative and customisable to specific individual or department needs. This creates a central space for all performance management tasks, making it easy for employees to check their own progress towards goals and share self-evaluations. As a result, performance management is transformed from a once-a-year hassle that causes stress to HR, employees, and managers alike, and instead becomes a more informal and productive regular occurrence.

Making performance management more flexible and agile is essential in large organisations where the high number of employees makes it significantly more challenging to stay on top of employee performance than it would be in a small business. 

HR software can also provide real-time performance metrics and analytics that can help HR teams monitor employee performance and identify trends or issues that may need to be addressed. By analysing data on employee performance, HR teams can identify top performers, as well as areas where additional training or support may be needed. This can help HR teams make informed decisions about training and development, performance evaluations, and employee promotions.

Configurable company dashboard

In a small business, it’s easy to keep everyone on the same page. As your company grows, however, keeping employees up-to-date, informed on all important happenings, and engaged with the company mission poses a bigger challenge.

One of the ways that HR software can support your all-important internal comms strategy is with a customisable internal company dashboard. As a centralised location for all important company updates, upcoming events, job vacancies, policy changes and documents, HR software’s company dashboard becomes a single source of all the need-to-know information across your company. You can integrate it with an employee database with profiles and contact information, ensuring that everyone across the company can get in touch with ease. Plus, a message board feature helps everyone stay in the loop.

By giving all employees instant access to the information they require, there’s no more for those mass emails that go unopened or get lost in employees’ inboxes. The central company dashboard means that everyone knows where to go for the information they need.

Moreover, a great internal dashboard is a great way to create a sense of belonging and community in your organisation. Featured employee of the month profiles, congratulations to teams on their achievements, company social media activity, and well-wishes for a diverse mix of cultural and religious holidays can boost employee engagement and a build a sense of unity that can be a challenge to achieve in large companies.

Effortless expense processing

With a lot of employees, you’ve likely got a lot of expenses to deal with. For enterprises with hundreds of employees or multiple locations around the country or world, human resources teams often have to process ceiling-high stacks of receipts from travel, team lunches, and more. 

Manual expense processing may be the way you’ve always done it, but it leaves you dealing with two main problems: it’s a huge time sink for HR professionals, and errors or delays tend to creep in. Suddenly, you have swarms of angry employees on your hands who are out-of-pocket for travel expenses or haven’t received the right amount of compensation — another huge time sink. 

Mobile-enabled HR software with built-in expense management is a great solution to these troubles. Allowing employees to photograph their receipts within the mobile HR app and instantly upload them to the system, HR software helps avoid those stacks of paper covering your desks. Then, you can automate expense reimbursements, configure approvals, and keep an eye on key expenses data with ease from within the expense management system. Significantly cutting the time spent on processing expenses, HR software frees your team from the admin and improves accuracy and speed at the same time.

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Try enterprise-level HR and payroll software

Ready to upgrade your HR and payroll with powerful cloud-based software? Look no further than XCD HR and payroll, a best-in-class single solution built on the Salesforce platform. With all these features and many more, XCD HR and payroll software is a must-have for any large business looking to boost efficiency, streamline processes, and see an immediate and impressive return on investment.

Check out our case studies or read our blog on building a case for HR software to find your next steps. Or, book a demo of our software today — our experts will be happy to answer any questions and advise you.