It’s not a secret that change is disruptive. It forces you to move out of the routines that you have gotten so used to and it forces you to learn, settle into new enhanced processes and new tools, that too on top of your already brimming workload. So why would you even change the way you work if it’s working fine right now?
In our daily interactions with accounting professionals, we have learnt that a lot of the accounting firms are facing challenges with the shifting status quo.
Their best and the most senior talent is leaving the country, their clients are trying to cut down their operational costs, it’s hard to find great talent among the competition and the unmet demand. So, saying no to all new things might sound like the right thing to do / So saying yes to new things might sound counter intuitive.
However, any accounting firm or any business for that matter, was founded with a greater than life dream to grow into a leader in the industry. So, if you are not working as efficiently as you’d like, it is your cue to rethink the way you work.
1. Personal Income Tax Change
With the recently proposed income tax reforms, the payroll process has become more complex and cumbersome to handle in-house for most companies without a dedicated HR, payroll or accounting department.
The government just dropped a bombshell income tax bill, and it is going to change personal income tax heavily. There are three main areas in which this could positively impact payroll service providers and where the general public and employers will be struggling at.
- APIT is going to be complex for the remaining 3 month of 22/23 year of assessment with employees and employers required to consider two different tax schedules
- More employees will be liable to pay APIT starting this January, more strain on employers
- It is mandatory for employers to withhold and remit APIT on behalf of their employees
With accounting professionals already feeling like celebrities with people reaching out for clarifications on taxes right now, it’s going to be a great opportunity for payroll service providers to step up and assist employers and employees navigate these uncharted waters
2. Focus on Your Core Businesses
For a lot of accounting firms payroll services aren’t a part of their core businesses. They run payroll as an auxiliary service that will be either packaged with main services such as audit, taxation, accounting and bookkeeping or is an optional service that they could add in or opt out of.
But have you thought of simplifying your payroll process so you could process your existing payroll assignments faster and easier without wasting valuable trained resources on low skill repetitive tasks that are a major part of the payroll process? This will release more of your skilled resources for more critical and labor-intensive business functions such as auditing.
Payroll will then be your auxiliary business that takes care of itself.
3. It’s Downtime
Many accounting firms are experiencing a decline in new payroll assignments coming in and their clients are contemplating pulling out of outsourced services to reduce costs. However, it is proved time and time again that outsourcing of business processes is here to stay.
Therefore, this might be the best time for you to make your processes more efficient so that you’ll stand out from the crowd with the capacity to take on more payroll assignments with better quality deliverables.
You can work on areas such as better processes in Organization onboarding, collecting payroll data, payroll processing and compliance. Moreover, you can prepare marketing material such as partnership proposals, posts for social media such as LinkedIn. Contact us for a free proposal template that you can start using from today to promote your services.
4. Less Staff, More Payroll Assignments
One of the biggest issues faced by accounting firms and all sorts of employers is the huge trend of employees leaving the country for better pay and living conditions. This has left accounting firms severely short-staffed.
Having less staff with the same workload results in additional stress on your existing employees and stops your growth in its tracks. Automation of your payroll services will shave off a large portion of the labor-intensive workload that’s performed every month.
It will reduce the burden on your existing employees and eventually will allow you to differentiate yourself among the competition and grow when your competitor are struggling.
In simple terms, nobody who’s been running a business in Sri Lanka for a considerable period would tell you that it has been a cakewalk. Many Sri Lankan businesses who took challenges such as the recent Covid- 19 pandemic, easter attacks and even the tsunami disaster in 2004, as a wake up call to have a good hard look on the way they conduct their businesses have grown several folds compared to where they were at. Sometimes it’s good to have challenges thrown at you, it’ll force you to get out of the comfortable patterns you have set for your business and think out of the box, firstly to ensure survival and then to find avenues to grow and thrive. In the context of the current economic downturn and brain drain, process automation through software is a definite value addition that any forward think payroll service provider or employer shouldn’t miss out on.
