How about a cloud based hr and payroll solution; with a punch of customization!

With the abundance of cloud based HR and Payroll Solution, there is no shortage of solutions in the market today. But are you aware, majority of the solutions, out there are a productized version, meaning they are sold as a product offering rather than a solution. You may not be able to properly assess the solutions, as most advanced features are disabled in 30 day trials.

The best solutions in the market today offer you a standard process compliant process with plenty of flexibility and room for reasonable customization to suit your individual unique needs. The customization however may be slightly sophisticated to execute, having said that, in todays business environment no two organizations are same and you cannot copy paste solution implementations across the board.

We take a look at a few pointers which will help you assess the solution for the level of flexibility you are after.

• If everything in the solution is offered as a standard module, don’t be afraid to ask what is meant by non-standard, don’t get too impressed by having 25 modules as standard, but you may not be able to add even a remarks field if you need to somewhere in your data set.
• Know the type of reports you will get, the ability to add custom fields in those reports, ability to change the report design or filters, formats. Take some sample of your own reports try to replicate during the demonstration or trial.
• Find out if there is ability to do a process change i.e. before you start the monthly payroll run, you may want to run a quick check and make sure all employees have a particular allowance. Try to replicate such a scenario, to figure out how easy or difficult it is.
• Pick out an example of a new process which may be required by law, you may want to introduce a change, find out how easy or difficult would it be, will the solution support the change in the standard code base or keep adding custom changes to your instance. For instance is no tax is applicable today, take a futuristic scenario, for applying a sample tax rate slab, discuss with the vendor the possibilities.
• Ask the vendor what processes are applied to keep a track of custom code changes unique to customers, request some evidence in order to validate the process the vendor is using, if the vendor is reluctant, they are not probably organised the way they should be, then you are at the mercy of excel sheets and individuals rather than a proper automated solution
• Ask for a standard price to do custom changes, agree on an hourly price and keep it locked for a longer term say 3 years or so, so you are sure that your costs wont escalate dramatically, when you need some changes to be done, if there is a need to be compliant by local regulations. This way your costs are under control
• Find out whether import and export of data from other systems, is possible, it may so happen, that you may already be using an HR Solution, you may want to use only payroll and already have the data, in the HR for payroll processing, you can easily avoid duplicate and redundant data entry by simply adding a custom change to import/export data.
• Finally, the flexibility offered with regard to custom changes should be a balance between product, functions, needs and technical complexity. It should not so happen that there is so much flexibility that you may end up having a completely differently version of the standard product, the objective here is to have a custom module within a standard solution, not the other way round. You may loose on new features introduced by the standard product, in this scenario and also increase upgrade costs and maintenance costs.

There are many more considerations that go into this scenario, there are a few pointers which will get you started in the right direction.

HR Chronicle gives you the ability to have your own Standard HR Chronicle instance with virtually unlimited flexibility. You can have your own separate database schema, which is independent of the standard database structure, forward compatibility is already a plus, when the technology upgrades you are upgraded automatically. You can add your own custom menus, fields, processes, reports, screens, your own private cloud based HR and Payroll Solution within HR Chronicle.

Give us a shout to find out why we are so open and ever embracing to customization of HR Chronicle.