Service provider closes the gap between time recording and payroll accounting
For a service company like Langner Gastro & Verwaltung GmbH, based in Hohenpeißenberg, Bavaria, transparent electronic time recording and reliable payroll accounting for its 90 or so employees are among the most important tasks alongside day-to-day business. Until now, however, time recording and subsequent billing via the external tax office involved many manual checking and editing processes. Reason enough for Managing Director Jens Langner to replace the existing time recording system with a professional and modern time management system at the end of 2015, which reduces the manual effort on both the operational and tax consultancy side to a minimum.
Preparatory payroll accounting caused high personnel expenses
A simple electronic clocking system was previously used to record employee time, but with increasing business success and growth, this no longer offered the required scope for convenient calculation, evaluation, correction and processing for the tax office. “As a result, the preparatory payroll accounting for the tax office and the calculation of the various wage types was carried out with high personnel costs and largely by hand using numerous lists and paper documents. Checking and controlling the numerous paper documents before they were forwarded to the tax office for processing was also laborious and time-consuming,” says Jens Langner, describing the situation at the time.
Complex requirements for interface and service provider
Together with the tax consultant, the management finally made the decision in 2015 to introduce a suitable solution to support and automate the payroll accounting processes. This was to form a reliable, largely autonomous interface between preparatory payroll accounting on the one hand and further processing in the tax office via DATEV LODAS on the other. With a three-shift system, part-time and full-time employees and a wide variety of wage types and employee profiles, among other things, the company has a large number of requirements that need to be mapped in the HR management system. In addition, it should be possible to limit hours for employees or pay grades in a simple way so that employees are paid according to their actual shift time and not according to the time they remain before or after the end of the shift. Finally, it should be possible to import the generated accounting file directly, automatically and error-free into DATEV LODAS. Key challenges that demand a great deal from both the future solution and the expertise of the system integrator.
Going live in just two weeks
After an internal coordination process with the payroll office and a thorough examination of the requirements profile, a recommendation from DATEV for REINER SCT and the system house LANOS, which has developed a special data integration solution with many useful functional enhancements with Payroll+, finally provided the impetus for the implementation project. The entire implementation process, from parameterizing the system to transferring master data and going live, took just two weeks in total and was completed in December 2015. “The implementation went largely smoothly, with only two minor challenges at the beginning of the project: One technical challenge was our decentralized organizational structure. As we have several branches that were previously not fully linked to our time recording system, they first had to be connected to the IT system. This ensured that the time recording data was transferred directly to the central server in real time and that employees could clock in and out on our server,” says Jens Langner. “We initially underestimated the complexity of creating our employee-specific master data, including the associated wage types, bonuses, wage groups, shift profiles, etc., so there were a few control loops here and there. But with the support of the LANOS specialists, who were able to get an idea of the structures and processes on site in advance, we were able to put the new system into operation after a short time.”
Added value: vacation planning and application system simplify workflows
The time management officer at Langner, who is responsible for recording absences due to illness, checking preparatory payroll accounting and other data relevant to payroll accounting, can now devote herself to new, value-adding tasks thanks to largely automated processes. If there are no special cases such as employee fluctuations or correction calculations from the previous month, this process is now fully automated at Langner Gastro und Verwaltung GmbH with the generation of an export file and encrypted transmission to the tax consultant. Additional functions, such as integrated vacation planning for employees, an application system for operational approval processes and reliable error validation, provide the company with the necessary convenience for handling day-to-day business. Further features of the timeCard time recording and payroll accounting+, such as project management or report output for commercial evaluations and analysis of employee statistics, are not yet in use, but offer additional potential as the company continues to grow.
With the timecard from REINER SCT and the payroll accounting+ add-on solution, the company can now look forward to the stricter legal documentation and verification requirements in 2015 with confidence.
