Payroll System: Moving from spreadsheet to standard payroll dashboard

Dashboard of pearl constructions

Introduction

So it’s almost the end of the month, and like every month, finance managers are to prepare the payroll of the company for salary payment. The most important thing for managers is to get the payroll sorted out in time so salaries can be paid swiftly.

This dashboard I worked on is meant to make their work easier and faster by saving them time from manually computing on spreadsheet, which definitely will take more days to complete the process.

Design Process

I followed four steps of a five-phase design thinking process to assist finance manager with their needs.

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

Research

Payroll, at its most basic, is the process by which an employer pays an employee for work performed. Payroll duties can be a real burden on finance managers. Most managers process their payroll by using a spreadsheet and this process have some disadvantages.

1. Scalability: As an organization grows so does the data. It becomes increasingly impossible for managers to handle such huge databases manually without considerable errors.
2. Duplicate entries: Spreadsheets have no means of highlighting duplicate entries and thus these duplicate entries lead to erroneous spreadsheets and misinterpretation of data.
3. Prone to human errors: They may or may not be intentional, but errors while feeding, modifying, replacing or deleting HR data surely results in erroneous outputs.

That’s why all organizations need a reliable, effective and easy-to-use payroll system.

Persona

User Persona

Sketch

Pen and paper never fails. This is the very first step in achieving the final UI design. It is faster testing different ideas at this stage. I arrived at these final sketches for the dashboard after several iterations.

Solution

There are two sides to the solution for this problem. I have the employee and the manager side. This solution is focused on the manager’s side of the dashboard and I will make some assumptions for the employee’s side of the dashboard. There are three important sections of the dashboard:

1. Employees’ tab
2. Time tracking
3. Payroll

Employees’ tab

Employees’ tab

To automate the process of payroll system, it is important to have the data of all employees working with your organization. Information such as Name, ID number, Title and Phone number are displayed. Each employee can be explored to see more information about him/her(see prototype)

Time tracking

Time tracking tab

Here, I have two features — settings and my team’s hours.

Settings

Finance manager must add people to their time tracking tab. This way it becomes very easy to synchronize and have access to the number of hours each employee has spent in a particular range of date. This feature is important because it helps in the automatic calculation of salary to be paid for a particular month.

My team’s hours

Tracking becomes very easy when employees are added to the tracking tab. On the employee’s side of the dashboard, they will check in and check out daily. Check in and check out time from the employee’s dashboard will give us the number for regular hours spent by a particular employee over a specified period of time. Overtime and time off are also logged. Addition of all these data, will give us the Total hours spent by an employee. This information is important in calculating the salary of an employee and the process is automated. Total hours spent by each employee has to be verified and approved by the manager(this is important for transparency and control). The manager must synchronize the hours into the payroll.

Daily log of hours spent by an employee

Payroll

Salaries and taxes are calculated in this section of the dashboard

Calculating hours and pay for each employee

At this part of the dashboard, all factors are automatically displayed since we have the data. It can be edited if there are errors. Regular hours, Overtime, hourly rate are used to calculate final payout for each employee this is automated too. You can import a csv file that contains data about your payroll if you have records kept in a spreadsheet.

Review and submit

After every detail has been verified by the finance manager, he/she submits the payroll for processing. At confirmation, the manager can download the full summary of the payroll.

Final thoughts

Automating payroll saves a tremendous amount of time and effort over a manual process, as well as reducing the likelihood of errors. Manual payroll involves poring over spreadsheets, calculating various types of payments, then writing out checks by hand.

An automated payroll system quickly performs all types of payments, from basic salary and hourly wages, to more complex functions like overtime, double-time, commissions, bonuses, raises, etc.

It is important to note that these processes are not absolutely error-proof. Calculations are based on the data the manager inputs. The accuracy of the result depends on the accuracy of this input.

Thanks for reading!

Check out the interactive prototype of this project here

Disclaimer: Pearl constructions is just an hypothetical company.