A New Payroll System

Today I ran our first Balance Point payroll.

I loved it.

Sure, it needed some tweaking, there were some little things here and there that needed to be adjusted, added in, recalculated. But this was the very first run in something that began a mere three weeks ago. And the adjustments and such could have just as likely been my fault especially with all the little weirdnesses that I wanted and that go with my specific industry.

Well. Adjustments or not, the programmer there was wonderful. I am usually really pleasant and I give more than fair warning about working with me: early morning is the best time of day for me; I have a very dry/sarcastic sense of humour and I can be brainless sometimes. As long as you can roll with that, we'll be fine. Arunan, their programmer, put up with my late afternoon uselessness, my mathemadical idiocy, and worked with me at every minute of this process to make it the most painless process in the world.

Once we had the tweaking done, the rest was so easy! It really was a simple, very user-friendly process. The Ceridian system makes the user go through "pages", the columns are a fixed number, so any additional changes or adjustments were invisible without opening up the specific "check" (I put parathesis because in the adjustment phase, nothing has been given numbers as yet). The payroll totals are on another page, so you cannot see them as you go. Their system is not nearly as easy to use as the Evolution program.

I went in to work today expecting a long difficult day with tons of tweaking and issues and just a slow process in learning. I wasn't thinking it wouldn't work, but just that a first-time anything can be long and and arduous. I'm also thinking back to October 2005 learning to run the Ceridian payroll. It was just as difficult then as now, but I also had never done payroll before at all. And that took a couple of weeks for me to get the hang of the basic functions and then almost 2 years to perfect the system. I had every expectation that today's run would take the two days I needed.

It was done today at 1410.

I really was impressed (again) when I printed out the payroll register during the Preview Process. The register looks great, just as the finished product looked in Ceridian, but not the register that printed out of the Ceridian program before processing the final. I will fall over dead if the deduction names on the checks (which I will see tomorrow) match the register. The Ceridian register read one thing and the actual check read something else entirely, which is very confusing when you are the one issuing manuel checks. Fortuitously, that does not happen often.

The company totals on the final plage where all beautifully laid out, easy to read and matched perfectly with my figures. So far, so good! And if I wanted anything broken out separately, I only have to ask.

When it was completed I received a cover letter (in liue of the payroll summary that Ceridian uses, that was simple to understand. Even better! It was not off by any pennies. (That will become more evident when I do the payroll reports. That will be its own adventure as I have to print any reports I want and won't know what I need quite yet. I hope there is a way to automate that insane payroll tax report. I wouldn't miss that.

I'll keep you up to date, but so far, I would advise anyone to drop their other payroll people and make the switch to Balance Point!