Your HR and payroll functions are critical to keeping your school and its body of staff running smoothly. Ultimately, they maintain the relationship between your staff and your school, and ensure that you’re meeting all the necessary legislations and expectations.
However, the demands of your HR department only increase as the education sector evolves. They need to stay on top of staff training, new legislation, and employment best practices, all while managing the day-to-day manual tasks that come with managing a body of staff.
Similarly, UK payroll laws and regulations continue to evolve, and requirements can be complex in the education space in particular. That’s why your teams need software that is bespoke to the HR and payroll in the education sector, to reduce inefficiencies and optimise their time and resource management.
- Self-service capabilities
- Workflows and automation
- Seamless integration
- Compliance management
- Schemes, regulations, and industry specific functionality
- iSAMS HR and Payroll systems for Independent schools
Self-service capabilities
Handling staff queries can be one of the most time-consuming elements on a HR professional’s list of responsibilities. Staff need to be able to ask questions, make leave and sick requests, make changes and handle key documentation relating to their role as efficiently and easily as possible.
Traditionally, they would need to work with your school’s HR team to do this. This often requires a lot of paperwork and back and forth that takes up time for both your HR department and your school staff.
Providing your employees with the ability to carry out some of these tasks autonomously significantly reduces the demand on your HR team members. By reducing the number of queries related to day-to-day employment management, they can focus on the more unique tasks that require their skillset.
Your HR software should provide the facilities for your employees to self-serve the most common queries related to their employment. These include managing their payslips, making leave and sick requests, staying on top of their training and key legislative documents, managing their personal details, and more.
Workflows and automation
There will be some tasks on your HR department’s list that are repetitive but necessary for day-to-day HR management. For instance, seeing paperwork and documents through to completion, daily reports, payroll, and the secure sharing and storage of key data.
These can be unnecessarily time-consuming and monotonous, especially when modern software offers easy automations for a variety of processes.
When considering the right software for your school, consult with your HR department to understand what tasks present the most challenges for them each day that can be easily automated or simplified. Your chosen software should offer intuitive workflows and automation, or the ability to customise these to suit the needs of your team. This can be supported by an entirely cloud-based HR and payroll software as a priority.
For example, iSAMS Payroll offers auto-generated Monthly Contributions Reconciliation and auto-calculation of retrospective pay increases, with tax and pension charges applied.
Help to reduce the legwork required by your HR staff by choosing a modern, paperless-first system.
Seamless integration
The best systems work in tandem with associated software to provide a truly holistic and integrated approach. Integrations make sharing data across systems much simpler, thus making your processes more efficient.
HR and payroll go hand in hand, so it’s important that these systems can share information. The payroll run can take up a considerable amount of time each month for your payroll staff, so it’s important to remove even small inefficiencies where possible. For example, your system should share key staff details and reflect changes to these records automatically.
The iSAMS HR and Payroll solutions work in tandem to ensure that your staff are remunerated accurately and on-time, every pay run. This supports both your payroll team’s time management and your employee-employer relationship. Employee details are automatically pulled into your pay run, thereby eliminating duplicate data entry to prioritise GDPR compliance and data security.
Compliance management
Compliance is vital to many areas of school life and management. It prioritises the safety of students, parents, and staff and ensures that you’re operating as expected by important legislation. You need to meet the expectations of both your school community and local regulations.
However, managing compliance isn’t a simple and straightforward task. Often, your already busy HR teams need to take on the responsibility of managing compliance in your school. That’s why your software needs to make this process as simple and efficient as possible.
Key features of compliance software for schools include document management and audit trails, e-learning capabilities and staff compliance management, asset management, and incident and risk reporting. This should integrate with your chosen HR system as an additional component, as this ensures that data is shared and accurate throughout your software.
A modular approach like this also enables you to build the solution that suits your specific needs, while also maintaining consistency across software and its connected databases.
Schemes, regulations, and industry specific functionality
There is a variety of software out there that was created to meet the needs of the HR department. While these may be great options and offer a wide range of functionality, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best option for those working in the education sector. There are niche requirements and regulations that most HR software cannot account for.
For example, in the UK, teachers have different pension schemes to the average UK employee. Schools are also more likely to need to manage a variety of job roles, salary structures, pay spines, and term-specific agreements.
Your software should be able to handle each of these scenarios seamlessly and efficiently, without the need to work with disparate systems to achieve the same goal. The iSAMS HR and Payroll systems were created to suit the needs of the education system and its specific HR requirements - including functionality for teacher pension schemes, the school workforce census, a single central record, school staff absence management, and more.
iSAMS HR and Payroll systems for Independent schools
iSAMS HR and Payroll solutions offer all the above key features and more for your HR department. Our software was created with the education sector in mind. Avoid shaping an off-the-shelf HR software to fit your requirements and implement software that understands the unique needs of your school and its HR and Payroll teams.
Our Payroll solution supports multiple roles within a school, pay spines, teacher pension schemes, is HMRC-recognised and RTI compliant, and more.
To learn more about the HR solutions that iSAMS has to offer, you can request a dedicated demo for your school below.
