No matter the size and roles that make up your school’s HR department, it’s important to ensure that all functions are fully supported. Your software should provide the functionality that your staff need to operate with maximum efficiency.
The best payroll systems work in tandem with your HR solution to simplify processes and improve department-wide performance. However, even the most popular payroll solutions might not offer all of the functionality that your school payroll staff need.
Understand the benefits of bespoke payroll software for schools to ensure you’re making the right choice for your department.
- Accuracy to support pension schemes
- Flexibility for multiple roles and pay spines
- Reduce admin with integration and data synchronisation
- Work with governing bodies
- Total control in the school payroll department
- iSAMS Payroll for Independent schools
Accuracy to support pension schemes
There are many components of school payroll that are unique to the industry. One of the first that will come to mind for many payroll professionals in the education space is the need to manage pension schemes. Teacher pension schemes vary from those required for other roles in the UK, and this means that the most popular payroll solutions might not cater to those specific requirements.
Systems that are built with these pension schemes in mind offer the most accuracy for each payroll run. Benefit from the peace of mind that comes with using a software that you can trust to calculate pension contributions according to your individual requirements, every time.
Ultimately, the less manual intervention during each payroll period, the more efficient your teams can be. Reduce their administrative burden with a tailored payroll system.
Flexibility for multiple roles and pay spines
Employment contracts and agreements in schools aren’t always simple. You might have members of staff that fall under multiple job roles and salary structures, or have term-specific agreements with each member of staff.
However your school organises its staff and their payments, a bespoke payroll software will be flexible enough to meet your needs.
For example, iSAMS Payroll offers streamlines retroactive payment calculations, automatic position-based computations, and natural integration with pension schemes according to job roles. Benefit from a truly flexible and tailored solution for Independent schools.
Reduce admin with integration and data synchronisation
While the right payroll system can make the difference to your teams, it needn’t stand alone. The best software solutions can integrate and are supported by other solutions across your school. Managing multiple databases and making manual data transfers is a thing of the past thanks to cloud technology.
Your payroll software shouldn’t be any different. School-specific payroll software should help to reduce unnecessary admin and legwork for your teams, and seamlessly access the key data from other areas of your system.
For example, all of the data that you need to carry out your payroll run should be found in your HR system, or perhaps your wider school MIS. The right payroll solution should work in tandem with your HR software to share key data back and forth, ensuring that you’re always up to date with any changes in your workforce.
Ultimately, reducing the potential for error and reducing administrative tasks makes for a more efficient payroll process. iSAMS Payroll offers both integration with iSAMS HR and external systems thanks to open-AI.
Work with governing bodies
Accurate and compliant payroll runs mean meeting the requirements of a variety of legislations and working with relevant governing bodies. In the UK, this predominantly means HMRC. However, you’ll also need to report to the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and the UK Teachers Pension Scheme (TPS), for example.
While the majority of modern payroll systems should offer functionality to take any legislation or procedures into account, it’s not necessarily the case that they will have links and integrations built in to maximise the efficiency of this process. Specifically, off-the-shelf payroll software won’t have the specific functionality required for managing teachers’ pension schemes, as discussed above.
A payroll solution that’s been built with education in mind will provide the features you need to effectively work with the relevant governing bodies and any legislative requirements.
iSAMS Payroll has a built-in link to the UK HMRC Data Provisioning Service (DPS), ensuring that all key tax and contribution information is automatically pulled into your pay run, such as national insurance, tax code changes, or student loan information. It also offers seamless reporting functionality for both the UK LGPS and TPS.
Total control in the school payroll department
While there are some regular payroll tasks that are the same in HR departments across the world, not all payroll runs navigate the same steps from start to finish. There are often intricacies that are industry-specific, staff-specific, or different steps or approvals according to the schools’ individual needs.
You need a payroll solution that is powerful and flexible enough to provide the functionality that you need, while also understanding processes that are specific to the education space.
That’s why a bespoke solution is the best approach to managing school payroll runs. They offer total control for payroll managers and help them to automate each step of the process, create manual steps or approvals, boost accuracy, and prioritise compliance.
With iSAMS Payroll, you can also lock down the payroll run once cut-off has been reached, reducing room for error and improving the accuracy of data stored for the next cycle’s run. You can also tailor and control your processes based on your specific needs, not the general needs of any other payroll department.
iSAMS Payroll for Independent schools
At iSAMS, our solutions are built with the needs of the education sector, and individual school departments, in mind. We understand the benefits that a bespoke solution can offer and want to make sure no Independent school needs to struggle to make an off-the-shelf solution work for them.
Both iSAMS HR and our Payroll solution work together seamlessly to support your departments with each payroll cycle, while maintaining complete data accuracy. Prioritise compliance and benefit from intuitive functionality that understands the requirements and legislation in the Independent school industry.
Want to learn more about HR or Payroll? You can request a demo below.