So in my previous blog I established that Future Payroll is smart. It has a lot of business content, it tells you about how it is setup and put together. It knows about all the compliance-related things, and it makes sure you are doing payroll right. So with all that knowledge built in, let’s have Future Payroll do more of the configuration and setup work for you. Again, an example will make it clearer.
Let’s say you need to add a new type of payment to your payroll – in on-premise SAP we call these ‘wagetypes’. Instead of going to your IT group to fill out some forms and get the configuration started, you have a ‘super user’ or payroll supervisor do it directly in the system.
You login to Future Payroll and select the ‘Create Payment Type’ menu item. Future Payroll asks you what country this is for? What type of payment is it (something like salary, a bonus, overtime, deferred compensation, imputed income, etc)? Based on that answer we can make some assumptions on how it is taxed and garnished, as well as branching out to some other questions. What 401k plan(s) is it eligible for? Does it count towards pension hours and earnings? Is it always a flat amount or could it have hours associated with it? If it has hours, what rate of pay do we use? How does it factor into the FLSA Regular Rate of pay? What GL accounts does it map to, by company code and is there a fixed cost center with it? What reports do we need to see it on? And on and on… I think (hope!) you get it now. Since Future Payroll has a lot of business knowledge, it can ask us questions and create this new payment type just the way we want it. And we can add our own business logic to spur questions that are specific to our own company (which bonus program does this payment add in to?).
So after playing 20 (or 30 or 40) questions Future Payroll has us review all the settings. We can keep them or change them. We test, adjust and tweak until we like the results. Future Payroll captures the test results and sign-offs so that we can make the auditors happy, and then we go live with it. And we push it to production when ready.
Now, some will argue this is too complex to program – how could a system know all that, do all that? Well, if we can program ‘Hey Siri’ then I think we can program an inquisitive payroll system, we’re just not used to doing that sort of programming in a business system.
Of course this takes away a lot of IT and consultant work in productive systems. The remaining IT/consulting work is in getting the company-specific business knowledge setup. It’s about what is different or unique among companies – not what is consistent or regulated. That is how it should be. Let’s not waste IT/consultant effort on things that can be programmed and delivered the same way to all customers.
So there it is – Future Payroll working for you. Instead of you working so much to give it the answers it asks the questions it knows about based on its business content.