Oil and Gas Magazine - Chemical Engineering Masters Ultimate Guide - GineersNow

and admin issues, when it should ideally
be focusing on helping the engineering
business understand payroll costs, identify
trends, enable better employee experiences,
and provide strategic advice to finance and
management teams.
2. Not putting checks and
balances in place to your
engineering business
Payroll fraud is a major risk for engineering
businesses today and is often discovered
by accident, only after the company has lost
a vast amount of money. Many small and
medium-sized businesses are vulnerable
to payroll fraud because they don’t put
appropriate checks in place. For example,
they often give one accountant or payroll
manager complete access to the payroll
system and company bank account. The
simplest way to prevent most incidents of
payroll fraud is to enforce segregation of
duties in the payroll department. Employees
calculating pay rates and accumulated
hours for payroll should ideally not be the
same people who process the payments.
Different people should have responsibility
for capturing payroll data and for managing
access to the system as well as adding
and removing employees from the payroll.
Yet another person could be tasked with
checking whether the numbers add up.
3. Poor control over leave days
It can be all too easy to lose track of leave
days if an employee takes leave without
proper authorisation. The likely outcomes of
such irregularities can be that an employee
benefits from extra paid leave or loses
leave days due to errors in data capture,
or that their available leave payment may
be inaccurately calculated when they
resign from the company. Other issues may
include two critical team members applying
for and having their leave approved at the
same time, when at least one should be in
the office.
An automated payroll system allows you to
easily process leave applications. It enables
you to manage leave administration,
enforce company-specific leave policies
and ensure the records are accurate. You
can also introduce the employee selfservice
mechanism to streamline leave
applications and approvals for employees
and managers.
4. Travel allowance pitfalls
Reimbursements and allowances for
employee business travel are a minefield
if you are not prepared. A travel allowance
is a regular monthly amount the employer
pays an employee to compensate them for
travel in either a privately-owned vehicle or
for industrial, construction, technology and
energy engineering business related air
travel.
It is better to persuade team members to
opt for reimbursements rather than travel
allowances simply because they are easier
to understand. Once again, an automated
payroll solution will do the calculations for
you and help capture the right data using
the correct categorisation.
Final Words from an Engineer
There is no reason today for payroll to be
a headache or a distraction. Suitable tools
can help you take care of most of the red
tape so you can focus on vital areas of the
engineering business, such as growth,
strategy and talent development.
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