Less than third of SA businesses have fully-integrated payroll, HR solutions

Less than a third (22%) of South African businesses have a payroll and human resources (HR) solution that is fully integrated with their financial or enterprise resource planning system.

These findings, the ITWeb HR & Payroll Survey 2015 suggests, show that local companies are missing out on significant opportunities by not streamlining their operations.

The survey, backed by ERP consulting and implementation firm, Synergy Group and African payroll and HR solutions group, Sage VIP, covered South African organisations of various sizes and from a cross-section of industries.

The CEO of Synergy Group, Ashley Regenass, reveals that 82% of the respondents believe it’s important to move an organisation from manual to automated payroll and HR processes. However, many organisations are still not mature in their use of these systems.

“By empowering key people in the organisation with unified HR and financial data, enterprises can benefit from better labour cost forecasts and automated workflows,” Regenass suggests.

Read more: Study: fewer than half of SA’s SMEs use cloud services

Additionally, Regenass points out, an integrated ERP system will also give managers a global, accurate real-time view of HR budget, workforce costs and performance, enabling faster, better-informed operational decisions.

While the overall adoption appears to be low, MD at Sage HR & Payroll Anton van Heerden predicts that adoption rate is increasing.

“With more than a third (36%) of organisations in the sample opting for cloud solutions, adoption has leapt dramatically in South Africa over the past five years,” van Heerden says. He adds that data privacy and security are still some of the main concerns for reluctant adopters.