Canadian Payroll Association Statement of Requirements Worksheet

Question Description

Wendy worked as a payroll administrator in an international company with 120,000 employees that had an HRIS. She was one of many payroll administrators and she wanted to have more responsibility and be involved in all aspects of the payroll function. Wendy took a job as Payroll Manager of Copy World, a company with 2,000 employees. Copy World outsourced much of the payroll function, but Wendy and two payroll administrators were responsible for tracking the time worked, calculating employee deductions, determining basic and overtime pay and recording the reasons why an employee was absent. The three of them were also responsible for the human resources functions such as administrating benefits and pensions. While Wendy was thrilled to be responsible for the entire payroll function, she was frustrated by the limitations of the payroll system at Copy World. During her first few weeks on the job, she conducted a detailed review of the payroll system and noted areas that could be more efficient:

1. Information could only be entered in the system every second Thursday, so new hires sometimes had to wait three weeks for their first pay.

2. The pay for hourly workers was sometimes inaccurate because one of the supervisors often delivered time sheets late.

3. Wendy felt too much of her time was spent filling out reports for management. She was told she would have to find ways to be more efficient because there were no funds for additional staff.

4. In her old company, managers would receive weekly reports that compared labour costs, production costs and sales. Copy World had never had a report that determined the sales per employee and did not have any mechanism to collect that information.

5. Supervisors deliver the pay cheques every second Friday. Over 400 employees do not work on Friday or work only at night. They have to come into the stores on payday to collect their cheques.

6. The computers used to calculate basic pay, overtime and benefits are six years old and crash if two files are opened at the same time

During a power surge, the hard drive on one of the payroll computers was corrupted and all the payroll information for the previous week was lost. The President of the company realized that the company could no longer ignore the needs of the payroll department and asked Wendy to prepare a business case for the upgrade of the payroll system. Wendy was excited at the prospect of a new payroll system, but knew from experience that her case had to be convincing and must be cost effective. She set out to develop a Statement of Requirements.

Based on Wendys payroll review, what should Wendy include and exclude from her Statement of Requirements and why?

	Issue	Include	Reason
1.	Information could only be entered in the system every second Thursday, so new hires sometimes had to wait three weeks for their first pay.	Yes	Information only being able to be entered in the old system every second Thursday is inefficient Employees are not being paid on time Based on payroll threshold funds are remitted late to legislative bodies Timesheets being delivered is not the fault of the payroll system This can be resolved through the setting of expectations and working with the supervisor to ensure deadlines are met Payroll can send reminder to the supervisor few days before the actual payroll cut off A new payroll system could help with creation of reports for management Working with various stakeholders to determine which reports are required and which ones are not being used to eliminate the processing of unnecessary reports Wendy can have meeting with all stakeholders and understand the needs of each group and provide them one report which can be filtered by each department and this will save Wendy time Once reporting structure is finalized Wendy can propose to have monthly or quarterly reports to be provided. Assuming that Copy World would like to have a report that determines the sales per employee the new system can collect that information Once Wendy understands what management does with the reports, she can make changes to the current reporting structure and propose to provide new reports which management might like, that way it will eliminate the task of providing multiple reports Employees are not receiving their pay in a timely manner A new payroll system could be set up for employees to receive their payments through direct deposit Elimination of the manual process of stuffing envelopes and distributing cheques to employees Greater security employees will only access their information through the online portal.Their cheque could get misplaced resulting in a delay in their pay as well as their confidential information being at risk With new payroll system upgrade direct deposit should be mandatory for all employees Legislation is continuously changing; a payroll system needs to stay current A misuse of time if the system crashes often Any system that is implemented will likely require more up to date equipment to handle all of the features Regardless of whether a new payroll gets implemented, Wendy should be pushing for more reliable equipment to be more efficient and more secure with the information that is entered. Wendy should try to get quote and see if there is any possibility of upgrading the current payroll system and also do analysis of how much would it cost to outsource payroll then having new payroll system implemented.
2.	The pay for hourly workers was sometimes inaccurate because one of the supervisors often delivered time sheets late.	No
3.	Wendy felt too much of her time was spent filling out reports for management. She was told she would have to find ways to be more efficient because there were no funds for additional staff.	Yes
4.	In her old company, managers would receive weekly reports that compared labour costs, production costs and sales. Copy World had never had a report that determined the sales per employee and did not have any mechanism to collect that information.	Yes
5.	Supervisors deliver the pay cheques every second Friday. Over 400 employees do not work on Friday or work only at night. They have to come into the stores on payday to collect their cheques.	Yes
6.	The computers used to calculate basic pay, overtime and benefits are six years old and crash if two files are opened at the same time.	Yes / No/Yes