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No more surprises, please! But get your payroll ready for anything

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  Posted by: Dental Design      24th January 2022

Does your practice have a disaster recovery plan? This is a plan to enable the smooth continuation of business in the event of an unforeseen incident or set of circumstances. This may be a natural disaster, like a flood or fire. Or there might be a power outage or cyber-attack, or it could be down to human error.

Minimising any disruption will keep patients happy as well as the team, who will take the brunt of people’s frustrations if they find out their treatment can’t go ahead. As well as lost revenue, if the way you deal with a disaster is as chaotic as the event itself, this won’t be good for your reputation.

A disaster recovery plan supports business resilience and efficiency. It will enable damage limitation, and the chance to get back to normal quickly. It is good for morale too, giving you peace of mind that certain deadlines will still be reached.

A disaster recovery plan should be flexible, and more robust than simply having a backup. In every practice, there are processes and procedures that need to happen, whatever the outside world throws their way, and they can be complex.

More than admin

Payroll must happen every month – and be accurate, and on time – come Hell or highwater. During the pandemic, it became crystal clear that payroll is much more than just an admin task! Payroll professionals were rightly designated as key workers and if your practice used the furlough scheme, it was one way that money came into the business.

No one wants to think too much about March 2020, when you would have had to briefly close your doors, but hopefully your payroll stood up to the challenge! The pandemic threw the whole world into chaos, but workers still had to be paid correctly. Suddenly, people who had never given payroll a second thought, because they were used to money appearing in their bank account on the same day every month, were looking at it – and those who deliver it – in a whole new light.

If you just about coped, maybe it’s time to get your payroll future-proof. We all want to be looking forward and not back, but why not make changes now, to remove a layer of stress? As part of your disaster recovery plan, moving to an online payroll system and software will ensure data is backed up and stored to the Cloud. If you haven’t moved to Cloud-based working yet, what’s holding you back? Data that is secure and can be accessed from multiple devices and updated easily – what’s not to like? Making a transition to paperless working will also save on space and boost your green credentials, with less waste. Some online payrolls will also allow you to issue digital payslips, which many people find highly convenient and user-friendly especially those who file self-assessment tax returns and need to have certain info to hand.

Outsource for confidence

You could train more of the dental team to deliver payroll in the case of emergency – but why not just outsource it to a specialist provider? This will save you time as well as money too, as the whole process will be taken out of the practice. The best payroll providers will have rigorously and regularly tested their own disaster recovery plans, giving you full confidence that even if you come in after the weekend to find the reception full of rain water, people will still be paid correctly and when they expect to be.

Wagemate is a specialist provider who will keep your payroll going, no matter what comes your way next year. Last year, they even won an award for their own disaster recovery plan. Wagemate will manage everything, dealing not just with all salaries but also pensions, employee benefits and things like sick pay and maternity pay. They will also be part of your team, supporting you, helping you be more efficient, keeping your data secure and giving you back more time to spend developing exciting ideas for 2022 and beyond.

Having a disaster recovery plan is eminently sensible especially in the light of the past two years! But you don’t have to do everything yourself. An outsourced payroll means mean it will always happen, so it should be a key element to your plan. Even though we will hopefully never see a disaster on the same scale as 2020-2021 again, even a minor catastrophe can interrupt the flow of your working day and cause all manner of trouble. So put everything you need in place so you can get things back up and running, and keep them moving, no matter what life throws your way.

 

To better manage your payroll, contact payroll specialists Wagemate today,
tel: 03330 102102 or email
info@wagemate.com


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