5 min read
October 12, 2016 
Human resources (HR) Software could be vital for solving financial legislation and compliance issues faced by not-for-profits, particularly following disclosures of the abuse of charitable contributions in many Irish non-profits and charities.
Transparency has become an obsession for every CEO and finance department. It is, however, equally important to set policies and procedures on how your organisation manages its people.
Not-for-profit organisations often face issues and problems related to compliance when it comes to managing their employees due to limited resources and insufficient funds.
A recent Workplace Relations Commission(WRC) report stated that 43% of non-profit companies were not compliant with employment legislation after an inspection.
Implementing a self-service, online HR software system will ensure that life is easier for your employees and will have an overall impact on the performance of your company. Implementing a smart and automated system should not be feared or avoided, as it can help you to ensure overall compliance.
How to Make Your Organisation Compliant with Employment Legislation
It has become a common misconception that once companies have submitted a contract to their employees, they have complied with legislation, but this is not the case. Employment legislation covers a range of topics:
- Organisation of working time
- Minimum wage
- Health and safety
- Redundancy
- Discrimination
- Parental rights
- Data protection
- Information and consultation of employee regulations
All these areas need written policies that are issued to employees and signed. No matter what size your organisation is, this is an increasingly difficult task to manage when you're paper-based.
Having a robust, user-friendly HR system and, most importantly, a tool which can make your organisation compliant is vital in today’s fast-paced environment.
HR software that allows you to manage holidays, absences and HR documents effectively in a paperless and automated environment has undoubtedly become the best option.
It doesn't just save time and money, but ensures compliance too. By minimising administrative expenditure, organisations can focus on what is most important – operational effectiveness.
Managing employee holidays, leave, absence, compensation, timesheets, and the rest can be a challenging and questionable task if not done promptly and accurately.
Accountability lies with the organisation to ensure accuracy and negligence is never an excuse. Directors may be prosecuted under the Safety, Health and Welfare Act 2005 for failing to comply with health and safety legislation; ignorance is never an acceptable excuse.
How to Manage Your HR Documents
When implementing an HR system, it is imperative that the system is able to manage multiple HR documents and digital signatures. When an organisation has all its HR documents managed in one central place, this negates the need for mountains of paperwork and physically chasing people for signatures.
It is also important that the system allows you to report who has signed the document. Most employers don’t realise that becoming compliant can be so easy if you introduce the right system to manage all your employment needs.
HR software built around an easy and secure methodology makes your organisation efficient by automating internal processes, which are remotely accessible, thereby eliminating administrative costs.
If your organisation is chosen to be audited by the WRC, it is so easy to produce reports from a system to show that you have all the correct procedures in place and that they have all been digitally signed.
How to Automate Holiday Management and Sick Leave
Tracking paper-based holiday requests or annual leave calculations in Excel is not only time-consuming and costly but also raises questions about data integrity and accuracy, making it questionable in an audit and difficult for people to own and manage.
Automated software ensures annual leave is calculated accurately, and self-service automates time off and leave requests. It also maintains long-term records which are easy to retrieve from dashboards and reports, thereby ensuring long-term compliance is adhered to.
How to Make Filling Out Timesheets Easy
When managing a flexible workforce, including mobile and voluntary employees, having constant access to timesheets is essential. Self-service timesheets allow employees to fill out their timesheets even if they are not in the office. Having an online system will also reduce human errors associated with absences and overtime.
An embedded automated timesheet system, which is easy and hassle-free for employees and convenient for managers, will ensure that all records are retrievable when needed, ultimately making it easy for you to analyse and make quick decisions. The quality and integrity of the data are of utmost importance, and accessibility anywhere ensures flexibility and ultimately saves time and costs.
How to Get a Return on Investment
Lack of funds can often be one of the main reasons behind an ineffective people management system. With the increased pressure on not-for-profits to be transparent in all areas, HR compliance remains crucial for the long-term survival of any organisation. Organisations often ask how they can enhance the quality of their people management while keeping tight control on expenditure.
HR cloud software is the perfect solution for all compliance issues being faced by any organisation. Compliance should not just be seen as something to be fearful of. Rather, compliance increases efficiency and quality of work. It also ensures that set and predefined processes are followed and policies are implemented.
Having a system that ensures technology is put in place to enhance effectiveness and gives an assurance of being 100% compliant will save money and time. It will also enable HR managers to focus on organisational effectiveness and ensure their company avoids WRC fines in the future.
Most organisations that introduce an HR system will save on average 72 hours a month.
Use our Return on Investment Calculator to see how much you could save with HRLocker!
