PaySpace has updated its software to help customers ‘future proof’ their businesses. All the enhancements and new features are innovative, and ideal for meeting the needs to today’s workforces, which have been largely working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Businesses of all types around the world, are using collaboration tools to manage working remotely, and our solution integrates features to support this. With an increase in Teams meetings, particularly companies with a lot of employees, keeping track of everyone’s whereabouts and schedules becomes nearly impossible.
To meet these challenges, PaySpace created a unique leave calendar integration into Microsoft Teams. This add-on enables managers and those with the need, to view their entire company’s calendar. They are able to track who is available and their whereabouts, which has taken a lot of pressure off managers. The app is available to PaySpace customers and ESS users for free. Moreover, in the next version, staff will be able to apply for leave, file claims and suchlike through the cloud, which simplifies the entire process.
In a recent interview, Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, said that Teams is the company’s fastest-growing business app to date. This has been evident two years ago as well as now, with the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve seen a staggering 75 million daily active users, up 70% from just six weeks before. With 200 million meeting participants in one day, generating over 4.1 billion meeting minutes.
All the rewrites on the new software have enabled us to roll out modules a lot quicker. For example, from a tech perspective, many new rules are still in draft legislation, leaving companies stuck between a rock and a hard place. We prepared ourselves and, at the beginning of lockdown, when legislation was announced on the Friday, we had the expertise and ability to roll out the changes by the following Monday. This was a major benefit to all our customers.
This is just one of many enhancements to the new software. For more than 20 years, PaySpace has made ongoing improvements to its system a priority. We have more than 6,000 customers in 40 countries, spread across some 65 industries. Three years ago, our development team began upgrading the entire tech stack having conducted a rigorous needs assessment to pinpoint the specific market requirements of a global software vendor.
Future proof incorporation
We made the call to future-proof our solution by incorporating Microsoft Azure and Power BI to introduce some really fantastic new features, services, and offerings. In March last year, we debuted our new system which featured all the benefits and more that customers would expect from a modern global cloud payroll and HR system. It was very well received, and our PaySpace Self Service product earned us the GPA 2019 Software Supplier of the Year Award, proving our tech-upgrade was something the market needed.
With PaySpace’s new technology stack, the following has been improved on:
- User interface payroll operations are significantly more intuitive, easier to learn, and provide instant feedback about the impact of each action.
- Multi-language support, enabling each organisation’s administrator and employees to log into the system in their chosen language, a highly useful feature for our customers across Africa.
- Several new and highly useful dashboards on the home screen for payroll and HR administrators, to give them a high-level overview of the company’s payroll and HR status.
- Displaying new engagements and terminations; general payroll health stats – such as changes in bank details in a given period; the number of variances by month; and finally, the number of employees who have not been paid. Aimed at helping organisations identify any anomalies that might indicate fraud or mismanagement in the payroll process.
The application programming interface (API) was also overhauled in detail, and in line with global standards, PaySpace has enabled any third-party software to integrate into its system. In this way, every single one of our screens can be easily integrated with any on-premise or cloud-native service provider, allowing customers to choose the solutions they prefer that meet their unique needs.
Moreover, the APIs allowed PaySpace to rethink and simplify the way payroll and HR administrators capture data. In the new iteration, when a large number of records have to be captured, users benefit from an easy-to-use bulk screen with filter options to retrieve, update, capture, delete, and deactivate data. In addition, we introduced interactive visualisations such as charts and graphs, as well as and Microsoft Power BI to bring real-time analytics capabilities with an interface that is so simple to use. Customers can easily create their own reports and dashboards.
Rapid roll-out enhancements included the ability for a bureau or company representative to add custom fields to any screen. In this way, should there be any requirements for a new country, users do not need to rely on the PaySpace development team to incorporate them.
Also, a web report-writing tool-set enables PaySpace’s compliance department to write their own legislative reports without having to rely on developers. Users can create reports with specific headings, field positions, paragraphs, and page numbers, such as contracts of employment, company forms, or general column-based reports.
Lastly, a ‘black box’ test was introduced to adapt to the legislation of a specific country. PaySpace is able to configure the new changes in a replicated live environment to assess the ‘before’ and ‘after’, to ensure that the results are in compliance. We see this as a critical testing environment that enables our compliance department to see how functions will behave before they are released in a live environment, where errors would be unacceptable. It is top of mind at all times, that as a provider, we are entrusted with the calculation accuracy of all the statutory components that apply to each country.
Contact us to future proof your business.
