5 Things Business Owners Need to Know About Payroll in Singapore

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

business-Singapore-PayrollHero

Payroll in general can be quite confusing. In Singapore, there is the added task of ethnic-based levies.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while generating payroll and paying contributions to the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore:

Contributions and Levies:

Singapore’s social security is paid out by the Central Provident Fund. Every working Singaporean or Singapore Permanent Resident contributes to the fund along with his/her employer. There are four accounts within the fund that can be accessed at different point of an employee’s life.

There are additional levies: Foreign Workers’ Levy, Skills Development Levy and the Ethnic funds (there are four accounts within the ethnic fund). The levies are paid out of the employees’ salaries. Employees may choose to opt out of the levies by signing the relevant forms.

The contribution and levies need to be paid every month. We have a more detailed post about this here.

Taxes

Employers need to complete a tax clearance form for any non-Singaporean (foreigner or Singapore Permanent Resident) that

ceases to work in the firm,
will be sent on an overseas posting or
is leaving Singapore for a period of over three months.

The purpose of the tax clearance is to ensure that PRs and foreigners have paid their taxes before leaving the country. The employee’s salary/bonus/OT payment may only be disbursed after their tax clearance form has been approved by the government.

Form IR21 needs to be submitted a month before any of the above possibilities occur. Failure to notify the government can lead to fines up to $1000. For more information on tax clearance, this is the link.

Hiring Employees:

The Singapore Employment Act is a statute that covers everything you need to know about hiring employees.

Some things to keep in mind are: Singapore does not have a minimum wage. The wage is settled through negotiations between the employee and employer. There are market rates for positions: for example this is a summary of restaurant wages in Singapore.

Another important distinction is between a full time and part time worker. A full time employee works a minimum of 44 hours a week. Anything less than that is considered a part time job. Part time workers have their own set of rules when it comes to leave, hourly rate, over time.

All the information you need about part time work is provided here.

Income Reporting

The Auto Inclusion Scheme requires employers with over 15 employees to file their employees’ income information before the 15th of March every year. The filing can be done electronically. A total of four forms need to be filled:

Form IR8A – for all employees
Appendix 8A – for payment of benefits-in-kind
Appendix 8B – for gains from employee stock options
Form IR8S – if excess CPF payments were made

Employee Records

Since March 2008, the government requires firms to keep a record of all its employees, their income and contribution payments to the IRAS for the last 5 years.

Learn More About Payroll

If you want to learn more about payroll in Singapore, visit our website and get in touch with us. We’d love to chat with you!

Why Assuming Payroll Is A Big Mistake

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Stephen Jagger

What is assuming payroll? Does your company do it? How much does it cost you?

Assuming Payroll

Assuming payroll is a term we use when a company pays employees in advance of the completed pay period, assuming the employee will make it to work between payment and actual calculation of payroll.

For example, Wayne Enterprises pays Bruce a whole month’s salary on January 25 assuming that Bruce will work the next five days. On January 27, Bruce had an emergency situation which led to him missing work. Since he already had been paid, Wayne Enterprises will have to deduct his salary in the next month, to make up for him missing work.

Why is it done?

Since this is clearly a complex way of paying employees, why is it done? Firstly, it gave companies time to go through the tedious calculations for generating payroll. Secondly, back in the day when Wayne Enterprises handed cheques to its employees, Bruce had to go down to the bank and cash it in. Since all companies paid their employees at the end of the month, employees would spend hours at the bank just to cash in a cheque. Paying them in advance solved the problem. The opportunity cost of deducting an employee’s salary next month was far lower than paying after generating payroll.

Today, in the twenty first century, that argument does not hold anymore. Wayne Enterprises uses GIRO and other electronic payment methods to pay its employees. The opportunity cost of deducting from the next month’s salary is now much higher.

Some companies still stick to the old way of doing payroll. When we dug a little deeper and asked our clients why they did it, they said it was because their board of directors had left the rule as it was made many years ago.

Let’s help fix the problem

Our client success head, Kieran Peppiatt, has seen through a number of companies changing their system of Assuming Payroll to the regular kind:

“Many of our customers have seen cost savings by changing from the assuming payroll method to the regular one. It’s more efficient, easier and more accurate.”

PayrollHero calculates deductions but we always advocate doing payroll the regular way. It eliminates any chance of inaccuracy and makes the payroll process smoother for your HR manager. When you have a high churn rate, it is even more important to adopt the regular method.

Download a one page Assuming Payroll info sheet below:

Why You Shouldn’t Assume Payroll – PayrollHero

Embrace Technology, Grow Your Business

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Pragya Gupta

At PayrollHero, we are always pushing for a tech enabled world for our clients. There are plenty of good things that come out of automating processes in your restaurant or retail business.

To name a few: it’s more efficient and saves time, which means there is a higher turnover of customers; there is less room for error; business owners spend less on manpower so overall costs go down.

All around the world we see a preference towards adopting technology. On one hand, it is because minimum wages are expected to rise (like in the US) while on the other hand, a shortage of labour supply is forcing business owners to adopt technology (like in Japan or Singapore).

All in all, the shift towards automation is inevitable. We thought it would be helpful to give you some tips on how to stay ahead of the curve.

Apps, apps, apps

We can’t stress on this enough. There is an app for everything today. Here is a non-exhaustive list on everything that you can safely outsource to an app:

Point of Sale Systems: Square is the most famous POS system. It works worldwide, which makes it easier for you to monitor sales if you run businesses in multiple countries
Loyalty apps: We’ve talked about Perx before. Loyalty apps help in bringing in more customers and increase foot traffic in your store.
Reservations: Chope is the rockstar of reservations in Southeast Asia. The Asian version of OpenTable runs in Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries in the regions, making it the perfect vendor for booking reservations in your restaurant.
Inventory Management: Another Southeast Asian favourite, Trade Gecko is your go-to app for managing inventory. With a clean and user-friendly interface, it takes very little for a business owner to realize that inventory management is a nightmare that is solved deftly by Trade Gecko.
Food Delivery: FoodPanda takes care of delivering food to your customers, while Slurp is another POS system that helps customers order food remotely. Slurp helps you take orders but doesn’t deliver food itself.

We have a whole other blogpost devoted towards these apps. You can check it out here.

Revamping the menu

Laminated menu cards are a thing of the past. Restaurants like Fish and Co. use tablets for their menus. With a few taps, your customer’s order goes straight to the kitchen. Tablet menus prevent errors in ordering. It is also much easier to change menus on a tablet than to print new menus each time you want to add a dish or change prices.

Feedback systems

Does that little device look familiar to you? You have probably seen that at airports all over the world. For a feedback system, this one is pretty elementary but it does the trick. One look at it, and your immediate response would be to click on the button that reflects what you feel. It’s an instantaneous feedback loop that can be used by almost any business.

Food bloggers

This one is more of a marketing idea. While it is not really about automating your restaurant, it is about using technology to get your business out there. Tourist destinations, like Singapore, are big on food blogs for suggestions to restaurants.

Some of the famous bloggers have a huge following on Facebook and Instagram. The idea is to get these food bloggers to write a review on your restaurant and let social media take care of the rest. Of course, you need to be confident about getting a solid review!

We hope these ideas encourage you to embrace technology. There is no downside to adopting tech while the upside will result in cost minimization and big returns for your business. Let us know if you have any more suggestions!

How to Grow Your Business in 2016 with Social Media Marketing

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Nix Eniego

Growing your business in 2016 won’t be a walk in the park. After all, more and more businesses are popping out literally every second. Make that 3 startups born every second!

Competition will surely be stiffer this year. You’re going to have to exert a lot more effort just to get noticed by potential customers.

It’s going to be an uphill climb just to increase foot traffic to your restaurant. After all, what’s stopping your target customer from checking out your competitor’s profile on Zomato (for restaurants) and choosing them instead?

But today, we’ll do our best to help you learn how you can beat out your competition and drive more sales with ZERO marketing budget.

Yes, you read that right! We’ll be teaching you tips and tricks to boost your sales this 2016 without having to spend a dime on ads.

Let’s begin!

Social Media Marketing

What You Need:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Account
Time
Canva account (it’s free!)

How it Works:

Assuming you already have an account on these social media platforms, (if not, go ahead and make one now!), the first thing you have to do is optimize your profile.

Fill in the important details such as company info, a short bio, Operating Hours (for Facebook), and a link to your website.

Here’s a look at well-optimized Social Media pages of restaurants in the Philippines:

Niner Ichi Nana’s Facebook page has everything filled up right: Profile Picture, Cover Photo, Contact Number, and official website.

Consumers nowadays want to know EVERYTHING about what you offer before they buy, so it’s best to have a link to your website so your potential customer can view your menu beforehand and get a better feel of what you have to offer.

It also helps that they know your operating hours and contact details.

Here’s a look at Chili’s Philippines Instagram Account:

Nice looking posts, and as you can see up top, they have a link back to their website.

On Instagram, the Bio / Profile Description is the only place where you can place a link, so it’s a must to have a link back to your website in that section.

Once you’ve fixed up your Social Media Accounts, you can now post updates, and engage with your followers.

It doesn’t matter if you have 30 followers or 30,000; answering questions and providing valuable updates to your followers will go a long way.

Make sure you are posting good quality content on your Social Media pages. Invest on creating nice visuals as it has been proven that posts with images convert higher on Social Media than ones without. Humans are naturally visual creatures, so take advantage of that.

But of course, we did tell you at the start of this post that this guide will allow you to grow your business in 2016 without having to spend. Yet producing great social media posts with nice visuals will require hiring a Graphic Designer…

Not quite!

Thanks to Canva, you don’t need elite photoshop skills or a Graphic Designer on your payroll to produce high quality and visually appealing images.

Canva in action.

As you can see in the image above, there are lots of free templates to choose from. You can also upload your own image, and add your own caption with tons of fonts to choose from.

Here’s me adding a caption to an image I uploaded. It’s simple and easy, you can do it in less than 5 minutes!

And the best part is that all of that is 100% FREE. Canva does offer a paid business version if you want to take things up a notch, so do check out their website for more details.

Now that you have your Social Media Accounts ready, and an awesome tool to do your visuals, now what?

Next step would be to post consistently, and keep growing your following. A good way to do this is to cross-promote your other Social Media profiles.

Here’s how Philippine fashion retail giant Penshoppe does it:

On Facebook:

and Twitter:

The brand is consistently cross-promoting their Social Media profiles which allows them to target and market to different kind of consumers. Do the same and you will be able to grow your fanbase faster.

Pro-Tip: Eventually, as you continue to post, you’ll be able to see when your customers are most active on Social Media. By using Facebook and Twitter’s in-house analytics system and your own experiments and tests, you’ll be able to maximize the reach of your posts even without spending on Social Media ads!

What’s the ROI?

So what’s the ROI of Social Media Marketing?

While there’s no concrete answer to that, it’s not a secret that consumers love to do background checks before they even spend a single peso on your product.

This means that interested customers will be checking your website, Facebook, Instagram, and maybe even your Twitter account. And whatever impression they get from your online presence will dictate whether they want to buy from you.

So you may not be able to circle in a concrete number in terms of ROI, but social media marketing is crucial to growing your business.

You can literally gain customers or lose them just because of your online / social media presence.

By taking these important measures, you can grow your restaurant or retail business in the Philippines this 2016 easily. Now start opening your accounts and get to work! 🙂

P.S. Watch out for our upcoming post on how you can use Zomato to market and drive customers to your restaurant in the Philippines.

FREE Payroll Kit for All Employees

Posted on December 28, 2015 by Nix Eniego

If you’re an employee and you’re reading this, then you’re in luck!

The PayrollHero team prepared the Ultimate Payroll Kit that answers all your questions and concerns regarding the following topics:

How to Compute 13th Month Pay
How to Compute Holiday Pay & Rest Day Pay
How to Compute your BIR Taxes
How to Compute your Government Deductions (SSS, PAG-IBIG, PhilHealth)
How to Compute Night Differential Pay
How to Compute Your OT Pay

All these and more for FREE! Click here to download your FREE Payroll Guide in the Philippines.

Aside from providing smooth and efficient HR, Time, Attendance, and Payroll processes to businesses, we also provide a wealth of information for employees regarding matters concerning their payroll.

So if you always found yourself making a Google search on “How to Compute 13th Month Pay” or “How much is my SSS deduction”, then our free PayrollHero Kit will do wonders for you.

You won’t have to Google about these payroll concerns in the Philippines ever again. Simply get the guide, keep it in a folder (It’s in PDF format), and consult it whenever you want to know something that concerns your payroll.

Not only do you get a more clear and defined answer to your questions; you also won’t have to bug your company HR with trivial questions anymore. You will be well-equipped with all the basic and necessary info about your payroll. Sounds awesome, right?

So download the free PayrollHero Kit now and learn everything you need to know about your payroll today!

How to Keep Your Employees Happy at Work

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Nix Eniego

One of the best kept secrets of the top companies in the world is also the most obvious.

Keeping employees happy is very important to the overall success of a company. The simple formula is “Happy Employees = Good Business”.

So what exactly makes employees happy?

Is it bigger pay? Unlimited vacation leaves? Big bonuses? Free lunch?

To get a better idea, take a look at this infographic from Manila Recruitment and find out what the best companies in the Philippines are doing to keep their employees happy.

Based on this infographic, money isn’t the only thing that motivates and makes employees happy. Employees value education, travel, fitness, and career growth just as much as they care about monetary bonuses.

You don’t need a HUGE budget to make employees happy. Sure, bonuses are great and will make employees happy, but if you don’t have the budget for it, don’t force the issue. Instead, you can focus on other low cost employee benefits such as additional vacation leaves or hosting sporting activities.

Are you doing some of the items mentioned above? Do share your company’s benefits and perks in the comments section below!

Be a Better Manager in 10 Minutes or Less

Posted on October 7, 2015 by

Many would like to believe that people quit jobs because of greener pastures such as better pay and greater benefits. In reality, employees leave because of their managers.

Not convinced? Survey results by the market research firm Gallup released last April revealed that half of the 7,200 respondents left jobs “to get away from their manager.”

As a manager, you may have failed to realize that your small yet talented team of employees are walking out the door not to pursue fatter paychecks, but because of management.

Put simply, it has to do with you.

Such sobering statistic should be treated as an opportunity for small business managers to build a team culture of supporting one another. Like most relationship issues, there is no one-size-fits-all formula to becoming an excellent manager.

The following tiny, yet meaningful gestures can certainly make a difference though. The best part is you can do them in 10 minutes or less!

Call everyone by their first name.

In this book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie wrote:

Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Likewise, social experiments proved that calling people by their first name makes it more likely for them to comply to your requests.

Make an effort to get to know everyone in your team. Your employees are humans too. They have lives outside of work — they have a family that they deeply care about or hobbies and interests that keep them busy outside the office. Take the time to figure these things out and greet them by their first name the next time you are in the office. By doing so, you build rapport that will eventually lead to trust in the long run.

Dig deeper into each employee’s resentment.

Most employees have their own version of what they are currently bitter about in their jobs. For some, it’s working extra hours and not being able to spend dinner with their family. Or missing a few drinks with friends every Friday night. Perhaps, it’s the lack of flexible hours within the workweek.

It varies for everyone but the takeaway here is to check on these resentments regularly. Subsequently, ask your employees about an activity outside of work that they consider important and pry them for possible solutions (they can extend work hours the next day, shorten lunch breaks for a couple of days, or ask someone to cover for them temporarily).

Doing this quick exercise will prevent resentments from evolving into a full-blown mess of hatred and bitterness.

Ask your employees for advice.

Ha! Why would a manager do that? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Social psychologist and author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Robert Cialdini offers one seemingly counterintuitive yet effective suggestion to making your employees like you: Ask them for advice. This could range from personal advice like book recommendations to professional advice such as asking their opinion about social media platforms that they deem are ideal for your digital marketing campaign.

By and large, this gives the impression that you, as a manager, value their opinions. Bonus points if you follow their advice and update them that you’ve done one of their suggestions!

Provide specific compliments and insert a negative comment in between.

The keyword here is specific. Sure, it’s easy to give out praise. “You’ve done a great job” or “Keep up the good work” are nothing but empty words of encouragement. Go out of your way to specifically determine the things that each employee has done well. Sincere forms of recognition are always appreciated.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to give out constructive feedback when an employee is obviously off track. In this Harvard Business Review article, the authors talk about the ideal praise-to-criticism ratio:

The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

The key point is to keep your negative comment as objective and rational as possible. Furthermore, consistently giving compliments ensures that you are within the ideal 5.6 to 1 praise-criticism ratio.

Offer one thing (no matter how small) to help an employee achieve a personal long-term goal.

Everyone has their own set of side-projects, long-term goals, and bucket lists. Say one of your web developers has been thinking about learning Python. Or someone from your sales team is keen about filling in one of the graphic designer posts.

Every so often, employees are interested in upgrading their arsenal of skills or learning things outside of their expertise. Why not do one thing to help them achieve these goals?

Offer to shoulder half of the paid online Python course to the web developer. Or ask the sales rep if he would like to shadow one of the designers for an hour each week? These little things will keep your employees motivated. The more they’re excited about their work, the greater the chance that they’ll work hard for you.

Final Thoughts

Tiny acts of appreciation and kindness are often overlooked, yet they have the biggest impact to becoming a better manager. Put them into action today and see what happens next.

Tell us about the results in the comments or join the conversation on Twitter!

Faster CI – Our Journey To Halving Our Test Runtimes

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Stephen Jagger

Warning, this post is a bit technical. 🙂

[Editors Notes] From time to time our engineers take a moment to write a post for our blog. From Adam our product manager writing about Scrum and Kaizen to Piotr writing about our Engineering Best Practices there is lots to read. Vince has written on the blog before, his last post was about Adventure Engineering in Da Nang, Vietnam. Today, Vince thought that what he has learned about reducing our test runtimes might be helpful to startup community. Enjoy.

One of my biggest challenges for the past few weeks was to get our tests to complete within 10 minutes.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? There’s just one tiny detail which would make this journey all the more exciting: Our code takes 25 minutes on average to complete on 25 parallel build servers and It takes about 4 hours if you run it in one.

I made a quick survey with our engineers and we lose roughly around 3 hours per day waiting for CI to finish.

The plan was to selectively run tests and have cucumbers run only on specific branches — epic, develop and master. This means that every time something gets merged to those branches, cucumbers will run after rspecs. And of course, all this will run in parallel on 25 build servers.

How our code tree looks like:

|- master
|- develop
   |- epic/adding-a-thing-with-stuff
      |- feature/with-things  
      |- feature/with-stuff
   |- epic/the-thing-you-do
      |- feature/bla-bla-bla

We didn’t have a way to execute this plan with our current CI solution at that time so we had to find alternatives. We tried quite a few but most of them were either had limited features or were just simply too hard to get started.

Enter Codeship. It took me no more than 3 minutes to get my first build up and running…and of course, failing. Getting started with their ParallelCI wasn’t that hard either. How you configure your builds opened up a ton of possibilities including selective test runs.

To make our tests parallelize (is that even a word?) I had to use this neat little gem called parallel_tests.

Getting started with the gem is simple. You can execute a group of rspecs like so:

bundle exec parallel_test spec/ —verbose -n $TEST_GROUPS —only-group $TEST_GROUP —group-by $TEST_GROUP_BY —type rspec

$TEST_GROUP is an ENV variable that I set on each pipeline. Basically just the number of the pipeline. $TEST_GROUPS is the total number of parallel pipelines. This is 25 for us. $TEST_GROUP_BY is how we group our tests and that would beruntime for us.

That is one other thing you can do with parallel_tests is group by runtime information. Using this grouping took 2 minutes off of our test runtimes. Getting logs from parallel pipelines was a little bit tricky so I had to do a little scripting magic to gather logs from multiple pipelines and concatenating them back together.

It’s simple really, in the setup section I have two scripts: one to upload each log slice to S3 and the other to download the logs and put them together.

Links for reference, apologies for the terrible naming: – Concatenate – Upload

Now that the runtime logs are covered, it’s time to make the tests work. I have this bash script in our code:

#!/bin/bash

bundle exec parallel_test spec/ —verbose -n $TEST_GROUPS —only-group $TEST_GROUP —group-by $TEST_GROUP_BY —type rspec

if [[ “$CI_BRANCH” =~ .*”$BRANCH_FOR_CUKES”.* ]] || [[ “$CI_BRANCH” =~ .*”master”.* ]] || [[ “$CI_BRANCH” =~ .*”develop”.* ]]
then
  echo “Running Cucumber…”
  bundle exec parallel_cucumber features/ —verbose -n $TEST_GROUPS —only-group $TEST_GROUP —group-by $TEST_GROUP_BY —type cucumber || true
else
  echo “Not running Cucumber”
fi

Conveniently, Codeship has a bunch of ENV variables set inside test instances and one of those is $CI_BRANCH. I just simply check if the current branch running in CI matches either master, develop or what I configured in the settings, it will run Cucumbers after RSpecs.

Finally, this is what our setup and pipeline configuration looks like:

codeship vince paca

This entire approach got our RSpec builds down to an average of 6 minutes and our entire suite to 13 minutes from 25 minutes.

Huge props to the Codeship team for helping out with the transition and thanks for the swag! 🙂

Editors note: This post was originally published here.

What are we reading?

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Stephen Jagger

We have been reading a few books as a team and reviewing and presenting them to each other. Think book report from school, but with learnings applied immediately in the real world.

What are we reading? Here are the 4 that we are working on.

Want to follow along? Check out our GoodReads pages to see what next and feel free to drop a comment as to what books we should check out.

&lt;br /&gt;<br />

Review: Hyper Sales Growth ~ Jack Daly

Posted on July 18, 2015 by Stephen Jagger

‘Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.’
– Harry S. Truman

book-hyper-sales-growth-jack-daly-300x300 Jack Daly has been on a tour of Southeast Asia the last few weeks. EO Philippines brought Jack in to speak to the chapter a couple weeks ago, then Jack dropped into Singapore to speak to the EO Singapore chapter follow by Jack being on of the keynotes for EO Brisbane’s Rob Nixon for his wildly popular accountant conference in Bali, Indonesia.

I was given a copy of Jack’s new book Hyper Sales Growth and it is a great read. It covers lots of great tips for building and running a sales organization. Some of the learning I took away from reading the book;

If you don’t have an assistant, you are one
Never quote price until you establish value
People are different, sell accordingly
We are what we think we are, raise the bar
Hire slowly; fire quickly. You are never “fully staffed”
Goals not in writing are dreams
Professionalism requires a lifelong learning. Instil a program of books, audio/videos, and seminars
plus much more…

The book is packed with solid, actionable tactics to growing your business. It is worth the read and it is even better to hit one of Jack’s events/webinars/seminars.

Last time he was in Vancouver, we arranged to get some one on one personal time with Jack. You can to… check out how we did it.

What book should I read next? Any suggestions, drop them in the comments. I’m always interested in sales development books.

On that note, here is what some of the team was reading a few months ago. I will get an updated list for a new post.

We even suggest books that applicants looking to work with us should read. Check out the list over on our jobs page.

Continue reading →