The power of an ATS goes far beyond just recruitment—it’s an all-in-one solution that simplifies time tracking, payroll, invoicing, and compliance. If you’re managing payroll and time capture manually, now is the time to consider the impact an ATS could have on your operations.
With improved processes, greater accuracy, and faster payroll cycles, an ATS streamlines operations and prepares businesses for future growth opportunities!
The Functionality of Applicant Tracking Systems
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are powerful tools designed to centralize and streamline the recruitment process. They help Human Resource (HR) professionals manage every hiring stage, from sourcing candidates to onboarding new employees.
Acting as a central hub, an ATS helps automate many of the time-consuming tasks associated with talent acquisition, allowing HR teams to focus on higher-value activities like the client and candidate experience.
Nearly 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on ATS technology to manage recruitment efforts.1 For large organizations, manually managing high volumes of applications would be impractical and prone to errors. An ATS automates much of this process, ensuring that companies can handle thousands of candidates efficiently without sacrificing the quality of their hiring decisions.
Moreover, with features that promote compliance, such as automated record-keeping and reporting, an ATS helps companies meet legal requirements related to data privacy and equal opportunity employment. This level of compliance is crucial, especially for companies that operate in multiple regions with varying regulations.
Integrating an ATS into Your Business Strategy
Combining your ATS with your Human Resource Management System (HRMS) creates a seamless flow of information and processes across the entire employee lifecycle. This integration offers numerous advantages to strengthen your organization’s recruitment and retention efforts.
Some of the benefits include:
Read More: Maximizing the Potential of Your Applicant Tracking System
Automating Time Tracking: A Game-Changer for Businesses
Manual time tracking introduces errors and leads to financial inefficiencies that directly impact your bottom line. Mis-recorded hours, forgotten entries, or manual adjustments can create significant discrepancies in payroll. These errors frustrate employees and contribute to payroll inaccuracies, overpayments, or underpayments, all of which can disrupt and strain your financial resources.
Integrating an ATS with automated time capture can dramatically reduce these financial risks. Employees log their hours digitally—whether via desktop or mobile—eliminating the need for manual entries. This real-time tracking ensures accuracy and reduces the risk of errors, which helps maintain payroll consistency.
Managers can easily monitor and approve timesheets, ensuring payroll calculations are always based on accurate data. From a financial operations perspective, this automation reduces administrative labor, eliminates costly errors, and streamlines payroll.
An ATS provides a unified system to capture time data and reduce administrative overhead for businesses managing a distributed or remote workforce across various locations or time zones. Standardizing this process prevents financial discrepancies, improving budgeting accuracy and payroll management.
Enhancing Payroll Accuracy and Speed
Payroll errors can seriously impact a business, leading to administrative slowdowns and potential compliance issues. A small mistake in calculating overtime, bonuses, or tax withholdings can disrupt the entire payroll cycle and create discrepancies that affect employees and the company’s financial stability.
An ATS automates payroll calculations by pulling employee work hours directly from digital timesheets and computing accurate wage calculations, tax withholdings, and deductions. This automation removes the need for manual intervention, eliminating the possibility of human error while ensuring that everything from overtime to holiday pay is applied consistently.
With ATS software, payroll can be processed much faster, cutting down the time needed to calculate wages and finalize payments. What used to take days can now be completed in just a few hours. This efficiency is important for staffing firms that manage hundreds of temporary workers.
Automating payroll ensures employees are paid accurately and on schedule, builds trust, and prevents potential financial fallout from payroll errors.
From a broader financial perspective, automating payroll helps you maintain tighter control over cash flow and labor costs. This way, you can allocate resources more and improve financial health and operational efficiency.
Compliance Made Easy
Managing compliance with labor laws, tax regulations, and wage requirements across different regions can be incredibly challenging for businesses, particularly those with employees in multiple states or countries. Non-compliance risk is high; even a small oversight can lead to costly fines or penalties.
An Applicant Tracking System with automated compliance features reduces these risks by ensuring payroll and time tracking adhere to local regulations. The system can be configured to account for various tax rates, workweek structures, and overtime rules based on each employee’s location. This ensures that calculations are accurate and regulations are followed, no matter where your workforce is based.
For example, if you operate across different states or countries, the ATS automatically adjusts payroll calculations to meet each with unique tax laws and labor regulations. Also, the system generates detailed reports to monitor compliance in real-time and be well-prepared for audits or regulatory inspections.
This, in turn, improves financial operations by ensuring that fines and penalties don’t cut into profits and that labor costs are managed effectively, regardless of jurisdiction. This feature is especially valuable for businesses with international teams or those operating across state lines, providing them with the peace of mind that payroll and compliance are being handled accurately.
Streamlined Invoicing for Staffing Companies
Invoicing is a critical aspect of financial operations for staffing firms, but it can be a complex and error-prone process. It’s important to ensure that clients are billed correctly for hours worked by placed employees, and manually reconciling time data with client invoices often leads to costly mistakes. These errors can result in delayed payments, missed revenue, and strained client relationships.
But with an Applicant Tracking System, you can greatly improve invoicing accuracy and efficiency by automating the link between employee time data and invoicing software. The system tracks hours worked for each client and project, accounting for every minute and billing correctly.
In addition, the ATS can automatically generate invoices as soon as time entries are approved, speeding up the billing cycle. Suppose you have employees working on different projects for multiple clients. In that case, the ATS tracks each employee’s hours by project, allowing the invoicing system to generate detailed, transparent invoices for each client.
When you automate your invoicing, you can focus on expanding your business rather than spending valuable time correcting billing errors or chasing payments.
Improved Transparency and Reporting
One of the financial advantages of using an ATS is the access to detailed, customizable reporting. From internal audits and compliance checks to payroll reconciliations, having precise and real-time data at your disposal is essential for optimizing financial operations.
ATS has the capability to generate comprehensive reports on critical metrics such as hours worked, payroll expenses, employee overtime, and even financial projections based on labor costs, all of which provide a clear picture of your workforce’s impact on the company’s bottom line.
These detailed reports offer insight into making data-driven decisions that improve financial management. If you plan your next budget or assess staffing requirements for upcoming projects, the ATS can provide real-time data to help you allocate resources.
Another example is identifying trends in employee overtime through the system’s reporting capabilities. For instance, persistent overtime might indicate that your current workforce is stretched too thin, suggesting the need to hire additional staff.
Addressing this early can help reduce labor costs associated with excessive overtime pay while also preventing burnout, which can lead to turnover and increased hiring costs.
LET NEWBURY PARTNERS HANDLE YOUR PAYROLL, SO YOU CAN FOCUS ON YOUR BUSINESS
Are you tired of dealing with payroll errors, compliance headaches, and slow processing times? With our automated solutions and expert guidance, we can help you optimize your payroll operations for better efficiency and accuracy.
With Newbury Partners, you can confidently manage complex labor laws and tax regulations while maintaining complete transparency in your financial operations. Reach out to us today because partnering with us goes beyond improving your payroll; it empowers your business to thrive.
References
1. Research and Markets. “Application Tracking Systems Global Market Report 2022: Rising Requirements for Efficient Workforce Management and Growing Usage of Social Media Platforms for Job Searches Boosts Demand.” Yahoo Finance, 30 Mar. 2023, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/application-tracking-systems-global-market
