PayrollHero Bug Bounty Program

CaptureAt PayrollHero we are so confident with the payroll calculations of our platform that we have instituted a bug bounty program for any bugs found within payroll calculation feature set.

If you believe that you have found a payroll bug on PayrollHero, we encourage you to let us know straight away. We will investigate all legitimate reports and do our best to quickly fix the problem. Before reporting though, please review this page.

Bug Bounty Program Information

We recognize and reward clients who find payroll calculation bugs within PayrollHero. We are so confident in our numbers that we have put this program together.

If you find a payroll calculation bug within PayrollHero you can submit it to our team for review. If qualified you will receive US$100 and your company will receive a US$100 credit to their account.

  • The bug bounty program applies to the payroll calculation engines within the PayrollHero platform
  • Any bug must be submitted to PayrollHero via our online bug reporting form
  • You must be a live client on PayrollHero

If you have any questions about the program please feel free to contact us. We will continue to update this page with more details as needed.

6 New Reports PayrollHero Offers | HR People Analytics

Our loyalty department has been working on some people analytics reports as a way to provide more value to our clients. Our team curates client’s data into a personal, hand crafted experience for the CEO or owner of the company. So far the feedback from our clients have been fantastic. We started with the Employee Happiness Report but have expanded the offering to include five other reports.

Employee Happiness Report – Semantic Analysis of clocking photos to determine the happiness of your workforce and answer questions around how happiness leads to productivity.

Clocking Infraction Report – Analyzes late/early clockings to determine behaviour trends and calculate the cost of infractions.

Resolution Analysis Report – Analyzes automatically resolved clocking infractions vs. manually resolved clocking infractions to determine how to optimize your automated thresholds.

Chronic Non-Clocking Report – Analyzes the hidden costs of employees who do not clock in or out. (resolution time, man hours spent, etc.)

Photo Mismatch Report – Examines clocking selfies to look for signs of buddy punching & other suspicious activity.

GPS vs. Worksite Mismatch Report – Collects all GPS data around clockings to determine who may be clocking in or out of their assigned worksite.7abde1b9-a98c-4858-a8e7-2ef75072fb65

Want to learn more? Reach out to our team to chat anything. Just click on the chat bubble on any of our websites, including this blog. →

 

6 Ways To Increase Employee Happiness

happy-employeeWe have been working to understand Employee Happiness across our clients at PayrollHero and have come out with our first report to help our clients make changes based on data.

The first version of our Employee Happiness Reports have started going out to our clients and you can see an example of one here:

We are working to understand employee happiness and how it relates to commute distance, wage, weather, who you work with and much more.

Inc Magazine wrote an article that gives you actionable ways to boost employee happiness;

  1. Celebrate Your Employees’ Individual Milestones
  2. Allow Employees To Express Their Individuality
  3. Foster Growth
  4. Implement a Two-Way Feedback System
  5. Recognize Them
  6. Give Breaks

Check out their complete article here.

Top 3 Toughest Aspects of Payroll in Singapore

Assuming Payroll

Often times, companies generate payroll and pay out an entire month’s wages to an employee before the month has ended. We call this assuming payroll. This is how it works: If payroll is generated an the 25th and paid out on the 27th, the manager pays the full month’s wages, up till the 31st, assuming that the employee will make it to work on the last few days. If he doesn’t, the manager Optimizing Work Productivity with Happinessneeds to deduct his wage in the next month

Assuming payroll is an inefficient and inaccurate way of paying employees. We’ve come across many business owners who do it in Singapore. Most of the time, it’s because they have been doing it for years and have never thought about changing the rule. We help our clients transition from assuming payroll to regular payroll which saves clients money and time. Here is a blog post on exactly how to transition from assuming to regular payroll.

Irregular Clock-in Timings

When an employee clocks in at 8.57am instead of 9.00am, the biometric device records it to the exact minute. Your HR manager needs to manually correct the irregularity because coming in 3 minutes early does not mean that the employee will get paid for those extra three minutes.

The PayrollHero app has a threshold feature that solves this problem. An HR manager can set a threshold: if an employee clocks in between 8.55am and 9.05am, their clock-in time resets to 9.00am, automatically correcting the irregularity that your HR manager would have had to deal with otherwise.

Disparate Systems for Time, Attendance, Scheduling and Payroll

payrollhero-benefits-featuresBusiness owners have multiple systems that deal with different HR problems; a biometric device to measure clock ins, a separate Excel sheet that imports data from the biometric device and generates payroll, another Excel sheet that needs to be updated every week with schedules for each employee and a whole other system that employees use to apply for leave. With so many systems to deal with, no wonder an HR manager barely has any time to engage with employees or find innovative ways to overcome Singapore’s labor crunch.

An end-to-end solution that removes any need for multiple devices is exactly what an HR manager needs. PayrollHero allows employees to click selfies on their phone or an iPad in the work site when they clock in. This data is stored in the Cloud and used when payroll is generate by the system. The same app is used when applying for leave or checking schedules for the week. An HR manager can use the app on his laptop, phone or any device with internet connection anywhere in the world and have full control over what is going on at his work site.

While these problems are seen as some of HR managers’ biggest in Singapore, they are faced by managers in the Philippines and pretty much any other place too. Some of the other problems HR managers need to deal with are changing tax laws, a labor crunch and laws against foreign workers in the country.

We hope that this post serves as a solution to some of your biggest HR problems. Do let us know your biggest HR problem and how you are currently dealing with it.

 

The New Employee PayrollHero Happiness Report

Optimizing Work Productivity with HappinessWe recently announced that PayrollHero can generate employee happiness reports for our clients. What does that really mean?

PayrollHero takes in data in the form of selfies that employees have clicked on the app. The selfies are used to evaluate employee happiness by looking for certain metrics and correlating them to other selfies. For example, smiling for photos results in a different set of facial expressions than a serious face.

We know what you’re thinking. What if an employee smiles but isn’t really happy. Faking a smile is not hard and the metrics used to evaluate a real smile are the same as those used to evaluate a fake one. An employee could easily fool the app into thinking that the employee is happy when she really isn’t. Well, faking a smile has its own merits.

A Harvard study showed that a smile – whether fake or real – can be uplifting for one’s emotional well being. Granted, a momentary smile for a selfie certainly does not equate to happiness in life because a smile can be fake; but the act of smiling itself is a positive way to cope with sadness. Our preconceived notion that happiness causes us to smile is not always true. In fact, the reverse of that can work as well. A fake smile may be a better path towards happiness than others. It signals a willingness to stay positive in difficult times instead of suppressing ill feelings.

How does this relate to happiness reports? Well, from a high level, the happiness reports suggest a correlation between smiling and happiness and therefore suggest which employee or work site is the happiest. But with deeper inspection, the reports find a correlation between smiling and employees’ positive attitude. As a manager, you should consider the happiness report as a way of measuring positive sentiments in your workforce.

Finally, PayrollHero can use this data against employee records to find a trend in employee behavior. We can provide insight into whether happier employees are generally more punctual; whether unhappy employees experience a longer commute to work everyday; whether the happiest worksite equals highest earnings. This information is unique to PayrollHero’s data. Companies can leverage on it to make more informed decisions on what it takes to improve their bottom line.

Want to learn more? Contact us to chat further.

 

How Happy Are Your Employees? Want to Know?

How happy are your employees? Do you know? Do you think it matters?

employee happiness reportWhat if you could tell how happy your employees are. Would that change how you make decisions? Would you adjust your operating procedures?

Today we are pleased to announce the Employee Happiness Reports.

“Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness!” ​is the core ideal that drives PayrollHero. We’re always looking for ways to measure, track and help clients improve productivity, performance and happiness across their organizations.

We have begun a deep analysis of thousands and thousands of clock photos to analyze the sentiment of the photos. We can then correlate the happiness ratings across other metrics like commute distance, wage, location, plus much more.Optimizing Work Productivity with Happiness

Some clients have begun receiving their beta Employee Happiness Reports and we will continue to work with them to understand what data is useful, how it can be actioned and what else should be included.

Some of the questions we are working to answer are;

  • Are my happiest employees the highest paid?
  • Which of my retail locations are happiest?
  • Do my employees commute times effect their happiness?
  • Are my happiest locations my top revenue generators?

Already a PayrollHero client? Want to know the answers as they pertain you your business? Contact us and we’ll get you your first report free.

employee happiness matters

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10 Hidden Gems in the PayrollHero Product

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The PayrollHero app is a powerful product in which time, attendance, scheduling, leave management and payroll generation are the broad categories of its features. Within these features are some nifty tools that could really improve the efficiency of your business’s HR managers.

1. Thresholds

Imagine your employee clocks into work at 7:50am every morning. He officially starts his work at 8am. But the payroll software you use records him entering 10 minutes early. To prevent it from adding those extra ten minutes into his payroll, your manager logs into her account to correct the infraction every single day. Now imagine her doing that for all the 40 employees that work for her. It simply doesn’t make sense. PayrollHero has the perfect solution to this.
PayrollHero uses thresholds to automatically remove infractions. For example, a threshold 10 minutes before and 5 minutes after official clock in time ensures that clocking in within that 15 minute period automatically gets recorded from the 8:00am point. The manager wastes no time correcting irregularities for all her employees and the business owner can be sure of the fact that no errors were made correcting infractions.

2. Leave Management

Leave management is a new feature in the product! Your employee can now apply for a leave through the app. Leave is automatically accepted and deducted from the total leave available in the year. HR managers can reject a leave request and offer a reason. The leave management system in PayrollHero does away with emails and informal systems of recording leave. All leave requests and rejections are archived in case you need to refer to them at a later date.

3. Mass import – Multi insert

The mass import tool is a neat tool for companies that have hundreds of employee records that need to be imported into the PayrollHero product. We provide a template for you to enter all your employee information which can them be uploaded onto PayrollHero. It saves countless hours manually entering information onto the app.
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4. Resolving attendance

Resolving attendance is one of the most powerful and flexible tools in the product. For example, if an employee comes into work out of their regular schedule, their manager may count the extra hours of work that the employee has put in. The manager can change a whole list of variables from clock in time to approved over-time hours.
Resolving attendance gives huge responsibility to the manager. This is counterbalanced by the fact that all changes are archived with a record of who made the changes and resolved attendance. As a business owner, you can check in to make sure that the records reflect the situation at hand.

5. Hipchat Integration

Hipchat is a team based chatting, media sharing service. It enables teams to communicate better. Especially if all employees do not work in the same work site. PayrollHero has a Hipchat integration. The Hipchat integration lets you see when employees are online and which work site they clocked into. You can even download the Hipchat app onto your iOS device.

6. Keyring

Oftentimes, managers hand over items to employees and hold them responsible for taking care of them. For example, if an employee is usually the first person to the work site, he is given the keys to the place and is responsible for opening the store. PayrollHero allows you to record what items are handed to the employee. Some of the more common items are:

  • Company email accounts
  • Key holder agreements
  • Locker usage access
  • Uniform
  • Company car keys
  • Software license
  • Mobile Phone

The idea of the Keyring function is to hold the manager and the employee accountable for important assets in the company. If the employee leaves, there is a checklist of items available on the employee’s profile that needs to be accounted for.

7. Geo-tracking

PayrollHero allows you to track the location of every clock-in. This means that when an employee clocks in through the app on their phone, you can ensure that the employee has clocked in at their work site. Even if the employee clocks in offline, the app stores the information till the device is connected to t he Internet. The app then uploads the information to the Cloud.

8. Portability of the App

Traditional clocking in devices involve installing infrastructure like a biometrics machine or a punch card system. PayrollHero does away with any infrastructure by having a mobile app. An employee may download the app on their smartphone (iOS / Android) and use it to clock in and out. Most business owners have an iPad at the work site for their employees to record attendance. However, many of our clients prefer not having an iPad and encouraging their employees to se the mobile app instead.

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More Than Just a Payroll Solution

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that we are a time, attendance, and payroll solution that meets your company’s needs. That’s true.

But let’s move away from that for a while and let’s look deeper into what PayrollHero truly is.

You see, PayrollHero is a cool app that lets you clock in to work with a selfie, and generate payroll with just a few clicks. That’s one of our biggest selling points, and one of the biggest reasons why our clients love us.

But that’s not why our product is genuinely enjoyed by some of the best companies in the Philippines and Singapore.

The real reason why our product is valuable to your business is because we save you time.

Time Management Redefined

Beyond the #selfie clock ins, facial recognition, leave management feature, and many more, what PayrollHero wants more than anything is to give you back the time you lose from outdated time, attendance, and payroll methods.

One of our clients, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Philippines, shared their experience on how PayrollHero makes their payroll processes faster and more efficient.

Here’s a snippet from CBTL’s CEO Walden Chu:

We wanted a payroll solution that was cloud based and built for the Philippine business environment, PayrollHero was exactly what we were looking for and took our payroll processing time for 700 employees from 16 days to 5 minutes” – Walden Chu, CEO, The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Philippines

WATCH: Walden Chu’s Testimonial on How PayrollHero Helps Their Business

16 days to 5 minutes.

That’s 144 working hours (or more, due to OT) brought down to just 5 minutes. I don’t know about you, but that’s A LOT of time saved.

Walden-Chu-PayrollHero-Testimonial

And that’s not all… The time that our ridiculously efficient product saves results into a world of other benefits for businesses.

Time Saved Results to Happier Employees

Because time, attendance, and payroll becomes easier to do, employees who act as primary stewards of these processes are taken a huge load off of their shoulders.

It’s not a secret that HR staff, payroll administrators, and accounting / finance employees are the ones that are most affected by the hassles of traditional payroll processes.

With PayrollHero, these employees can relax and focus on other important aspects of their work such as recruiting and employee engagement (for HR), and internal audit / accounting for those in Finance.

The system was not made to replace these employees, but rather, to help them become more efficient and less stressed with the rigours of traditional payroll. A more streamlined, easy, and hassle-free payroll solution can make these employees less stressed and happier at work.

Happy Employees are Good for Business

It has long been proven that happy employees are the best brand ambassadors you can ever have.

The happier your employees are, the more energized and motivated they are to work; and those little things eventually add up. Your customers will notice how happy and engaged your employees are, and this in return, causes them to love your brand even more.

Word of mouth referral goes a long way in growing your business. So the happier your employees are, the more customers you will attract. It’s a domino effect that you can take advantage of.

Beyond Business

Of course, making employees happy isn’t just done to boost your profits. As an employer, it’s important to always put a premium to your employees’ happiness.

With PayrollHero’s selfie clock in, we are able to help your employees start the work day with a smile.

Check out this video of how employees clock in and out of work using PayrollHero’s TeamClock App:

Not only do employees start the work day with a smile, they also clock out happily as they get ready to come home to their loved ones.

The overall mood of employees skyrocket, and because of this, their personal lives improve as well.

Right Person. Right Place. Right Time.

Not only does PayrollHero save you time; we also save you money.

Biometrics and time cards for time and attendance can be tricky. For one, it can easily be gamed by dishonest employees. There’s the case of buddy punching and ghost employees that is pretty much prevalent in the Philippines.

Take a look at how much money you can lose just because of buddy punching:

buddy-punching-PayrollHero

Even if you only have 1 buddy punching employee (which is very unlikely), you’ll be losing P4,000 a year! Now, in most cases, for companies with a very unreliable time and attendance process, buddy punching is more common.

If you had 500 employees, and 10 of them are regular buddy punchers, you could lose as much as P40,000 a year

With PayrollHero, you are LITERALLY free from buddy punchers because our system makes sure that the right person clocks in at the right place, at the right time.

You can learn more about Selfies vs Biometrics in this post.

Time to Make a Change

If you’ve made it this far down, then I can only assume that you are considering PayrollHero for your business. Whether you are running a restaurant in the Philippines, or a retail store in Singapore; or even any business in Asia, there’s just so much PayrollHero can offer for you.

time-attendance-with-PayrollHero

Handling time, attendance, and payroll for your business will never be the same once you go for PayrollHero.

It’s time to make a positive change for your business. Let us help you save money, and most importantly, save precious time for you and your employees.

If this is something that you’re interested in, we’d love to chat with you. You can contact us at sales@payrollhero.com or visit any of our websites: Philippines, Singapore, Global, to learn more.

Biometrics VS Selfies – Which is Best for Your Business?

selfie-biometrics-PayrollHero

Restaurants and retails stores usually generate payroll by multiplying their employees’ hourly rate with the number of hours worked by each employee.

The number of hours worked is measured by a time sheet that employees punch in, a biometric device or (if you’re one of our awesome clients) the PayrollHero app that lets your employees take selfies to clock in and out.

We get a lot of questions about why businesses should change from biometrics to anything else. Some say that the biometrics system is already ideal… that it’s fast and accurate. While all of this might be true, we have a strong argument for why biometrics may not be the best option for your business.

The PayrollHero app – an all in one solution

Biometric devices work as a standalone system. You need to get a whole new software for processing information from the device and integrating it into the software that calculates attendance. Often, you need another system to monitor scheduling, manage leaves and generate payroll.

On the other hand, PayrollHero’s TeamClockMyClock app records all the information you need to know about your employee on the cloud. It is an end-to-end solution that relieves you of the hassle of integrating multiple systems together.

The only device you will ever need is either of the following: iPad, smartphone (Android or iOS), or a computer (PC or Mac). PayrollHero’s apps are compatible with these devices so you are assured to have a streamlined process from start to finish.

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Wear and tear

The biometric device is subject to wear and tear. If you have hundreds of employees using a couple of biometric devices, you are more likely to face this issue. However, MyClock or TeamClock are is accessed within an iPad / smartphone (or computer),  which is less likely to undergo the kind of wear and tear that biometric devices are prone to.

Software updates

The PayrollHero app updates from time to time to give the user a better experience and introduce new features (for example, we have just introduced leave management! Check it out). The app is always improving and finding ways to make time and attendance easier for businesses, whereas the biometric device can only go so far in it capabilities.

There are other issues with the biometric device too. Biometric devices lead to manual calculations when there are minor infractions where employees come just a couple of minutes early or late.

We handle this problem by implementing thresholds within which these infractions are excused. This frees up time for your HR manager to do more important things, like finding the best talent for your company and managing employee relations.

Altogether, the biometric device may be faster in recording clock ins, but the time wasted by the HR manager in fixing the inefficiencies in the device is far more.

So if you’re ready to let go of your biometric device and embrace the selfie clock in, contact us at sales@payrollhero.com or visit our website to learn more.

Singapore Leave Eligibility and Entitlements

In Singapore, there are many types of leaves. From annual vacation leave, to sick leave, to childcare leave. The types are as follows:

  • Adoption Leave
  • Annual Leave
  • Childcare Leave
  • Maternity Leave
  • Paternity Leave
  • Shared Parental Leave
  • Sick Leave
  • Unpaid Infant Care Leave

You can see the breakdown of these leaves on the Singapore Ministry of Manpower website.

If you are looking for a tool that helps you manage your Singapore employees leave requests, balance and pay. Check out PayrollHero.sg or contact us at sales@payrollhero.com.