Master Vendor Automation – A Surefire Way of Reducing Payroll TAT by 25%

Payroll processing is one of those tasks. It looks super simple at the surface. Hey, all that needs to be done is pay someone what they’re owed; how difficult can that be!

This blissful ignorance is shattered when you get in the trenches and actually start processing timesheets. And if you’re processing pay & bill for recruitment agencies, things start getting serious fast.

What’s so complicated about it? Well, a single candidate could have had 5-6 assignments in a month (or even a week!). Each assignment could have spanned regular working hours, overtime hours, holidays, etc. All these attract different rates and the calculation is complex and takes a bit of time. Still, not such a big deal. There’s tools and processes that you can put in place to ensure speed and accuracy.

But it’s the laborious admin tasks that can really get on the nerves of a payroll executive. One prime example of such an admin task is the process of downloading timesheets from master vendor portals. Especially for an organization like that processes thousands of timesheets a week, this process is not only tedious but it is also a drain on efficiency.

Why? Because not only do the authorised timesheets need to be downloaded from the different portals, but they also need to be put into a consolidated, standardised format for further processing in the payroll software.

All this gobbles up a ton of time as the actual reports on master vendor sites can contain reams of data that are not required to process payroll. So, the payroll executive needs to take several steps, all of which cost time:

• Login to the Master Vendor Portal
• Download the authorised reports – for each trust, hospital and client
• Compile all the reports
• Format the reports and convert to the common format
• Place all the data in a master file

Next, other manual activities are required to complete the process:

• Process the timesheets, splitting hours based on day/night/weekend shift, by manually keying in it the data
• Perform the payroll run via the payroll software
• Make payments to the candidates / agencies

The process of getting the timesheets from the master vendor software can often take 20-25% of the total time spent processing a timesheet. At QX, we specialize in high volume pay & bill processing. So, our executives ended up spending a lot of time on this process and this presented a major challenge and opportunity.

We wondered “what if this entire process can be automated? What if a BOT could take care of downloading, formatting and saving the timesheets to a master folder?” So, we mapped all the steps and programmed a bot that performs most of the steps outlined above. The only activities that need to be done manually are the final processing of the timesheets, payroll run and making payments. For all the other steps, our payroll executive just needs to press one button!

Result: 20-25% Reduction in TAT for Payroll Processing

Typically, the manual process of downloading and formatting the files is 20-25% of total processing time.
That’s a lot! With the Master Vendor Automation Tool, this is cut down to the few minutes it takes the process to run in the background. With APIs and a system in place to, it is possible to upload the data directly into the payroll software, leading to further efficiency gains.

The best part is that the Master Vendor Automation Tool doesn’t require any permissions or integration with the vendor portals. It can work with different types of portals and processes:

1) Easily configurable to extract data from different types of web portal

2) Frequency of the automatic process can be adjusted: daily, twice a week, weekly, etc.

3) The output format and file type of the data can also be customised as required

Does your payroll process also face the same problem? Or do you run in other tedious, repetitive processes that can benefit from automation or process optimization? We understand payroll and we understand technology and we can help you boost accuracy and reduce the TAT by implementing smart processes and solutions. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you, please get in touch with us.

Originally published May 30, 2019 04:05:39, updated Jan 29 2024

Topics: Recruitment Technology