Update and changelog
We’re busy adding enhancements to the service – here are a few we’ve recently rolled out:
Changelog
- Advanced options for cheque printing – we now support both pre-printed and blank cheque forms. You can customize fonts, account codes etc. Please check with your bank as they may have certain requirements for accepting these customized cheques (including magnetic ink).
- More customization for GL codes – when we first offered the ability to customize general ledger codes (useful if you are exporting data for use in your accounting system) it was for general categories like source deductions. Now we’ve significantly enhanced this feature to give you custom GL codes at multiple levels. You can set GL codes at the company level (setting up a custom chart of accounts to match your accounting system). You can also set custom codes at the benefit/deduction/earnings level – giving you the flexibility to assign custom codes for custom pay rules (like setting your coffee fund deduction to GIFI code 8523 – “meals and entertainment”). You can even set custom codes at the employee level. Each employee or group of employees can have their own GL code – useful if you want to separate sales headcount from R&D headcount for example.
- Custom rules for benefits and deductions – you can now set non-cash/cash benefits and deductions (and further set taxation rules for them)
- For our accountant clients we now offer the ability to do true NET to GROSS calculations with full support of custom pay rules. You can set the NET amount you want to pay an employee and have the system calculate the gross amount with all the requisite source deductions calculated for you. You can even set custom deductions and benefits – we fully support “reverse payroll” through our efficient regression engine. Some of our clients are using this for special cases like shadow payroll and tax gross up situations.
- For our ePay clients we now support foreign company payments to Canadian-based employees. If you are a non-Canadian based employer, we can now support payments from your foreign bank account to your Canadian employees.
The feedback we gather at our user-community - community.paymentevolution.com – shapes the evolution of your payroll service. If you haven’t had a chance to head there, take a look and let us know how to make the service better for you.
Update and changelog
Based on client feedback we’re releasing a few enhancements to the service today. As always, the feedback we gather at our user-community - community.paymentevolution.com – shapes the evolution of your payroll service. If you haven’t had a chance to head there, take a look and let us know how to make the service better for you.
Changelog
- Rename your company – yes, you can now change the name of your company. This name is reflected on your employee payslips, records of employment and various tax forms. To change your company name, go to the setting menu bar and select company profile. Edit your company name and click “save” to record the changes.
- New report – cheques / payslips. Some clients have asked to have a printable payslip and/or cheque report so they can physically hand employees details of their pay. You can find the new report under the Reports menu bar. Remember, employees can still access their pay history through their own login credentials at www.PayChequer.com
- Custom rules for benefits and deductions – you can now add your own fields and have essentially unlimited number of rules you can apply in your organization. As always, you can customize the names of each rule (deduction / benefit) and give it a meaningful description so your employees know what the item is for (no more short codes and difficult to navigate legends). For information on how to setup custom rules for benefits or deductions see our community help article.
- Our e-Pay service now supports payments to your employees in the middle and last day of the month (in addition to Friday payments) allowing us to better support organizations on a semi-monthly pay cycle. Please remember to submit / finalize your payruns at least 7 calendar days ahead of the payment date to meet our processing time cutoffs.
- We continue enhancing the backend of the service to support new features. You may not see these immediately but we listen and implement the requests you make.
All these enhancements take place in our cloud infrastructure – without requiring you to download new software, install patches or update your system. Just log into your account, and the new features are available to you. Have an idea? We are always looking for feedback – if you have a feature request or want to see some changes, please let us know!
Update and changelog
The latest additions to PaymentEvolution Payroll are live and as always, we have our awesome user-community at community.paymentevolution.com to thank. Over there you can submit and vote on ideas, features and enhancements to your payroll service.
Changelog
- The latest payroll tables and calculation rules for 2011 are active. In addition, we’ve added the ability to “close” a payroll year so you can archive previous pay runs. If you haven’t already, login and run your final pay run for 2010 and close your payroll year to activate the 2011 rules.
- We’ve added 8% accrual and release of vacation pay (in addition to our already supported 0%, 4% and 6% rates)
- Vacation pay now supports custom release amounts. You can now, for example, release only a portion of an employee’s vacation balance as part of your regular pay run.
- Custom rules for benefits and deductions – you can now specify your own custom tags and calculation rules for various company deductions and benefits. You can use this feature to setup custom deductions for your employees (ie like a coffee fund deduction) as well as benefits (ie health club membership). Renaming each rule allows you to customize the decription in both your reports as well as the paystubs your employees see when logging into PayChequer.com
- We’ve added electronic payments – allowing you to pay your employees directly without printing or writing cheques. PaymentEvolution e-Pay is the safe, secure way to pay your staff and is available for only 50 cents per transaction. There are NO monthly fee, NO file fees, NO minimums. Its easy to get started – just click the e-Pay logo after you login to your account.
- Employee T4 forms are now available
- Multi-tax year support has been added.
- There have been many changes under the hood to support growth of the platform and added redundancy to ensure the service is available when you need it.
Since we run in the cloud, we can do updates frequently without requiring our user community to update software, download patches etc. We are always looking for feedback – if you have a feature request or want to see some changes, please let us know!
Update for 2011 tax year – scheduled maintenance
We’ll be posting a significant update to the system this weekend (Jan 1-2, 2011). As part of our planned maintenance, the system will be sporadically available from Jan 1 11pmET to Jan 2 5amET. We’ll update this post once the updates are complete.
A list of the changes and enhancements will also be posted. Happy New Year!
UPDATE: service changes complete – see next post for details
Update and changelog
We’ve released our latest update to PaymentEvolution Payroll and our employee self-serve system PayChequer.com. Many of the changes were driven by our user community at community.paymentevolution.com where you can submit and vote on ideas, features and enhancements to your payroll service. I want to personally thank Trevor, Charlotte and Lori (members of our user community) for championing some of these changes – your input has been invaluable. THANK YOU!
Changelog
- Export your payroll transactions to your general ledger system in XML format. To ensure your chart of accounts matches the GL codes in PaymentEvolution Payroll, first enter “payroll options” and select the “GL” tab to modify specific codes to match your accounting system. Export of the data is available from the “reports” menu under “GL”. There you will find a link to download the transactions to your local system.
- Vacation pay now supports multiple accrual and release percentages (4%, 6% accrual and release)
- Negative vacation pay is now available. You can use this feature to make adjustments to accrued vacation pay of your staff.
- We’ve activated a “demo” account for folks to test out the system. If you are new to PaymentEvolution Payroll, use the demo link at https://secure.paymentevolution.com/payroll/prMainLogin.aspx to create a demo account for you to explore the system. If you are currently using the service, you can always use the demo account to test out scenarios, check out new features or learn some of the advanced functionality of the system. Demo accounts are reset so don’t enter any data that you want to keep.
- Employees are now shown in your pay run based on their hire dates
- Employee numbers are now displayed on the timesheet and salary page
- We’ve added additional fields for data capture in the employee screens i.e. middle name field
- Our employee self serve tool PayChequer.com now supports the ability for employees to enter / modify their own email addresses, passwords, physical addresses etc. There have been many changes under the hood to support growth of the platform which we’ll be showcasing in the coming weeks.
Since we run in the cloud, we can do updates frequently without requiring our user community to update software, download patches etc. We are always looking for feedback – if you have a feature request or want to see some changes, please let us know!
PayChequer
Today we’re launching an exciting new addition to the PaymentEvolution payroll platform – an employee self-service portal and financial planning tool: PayChequer.com
PayChequer is your home for up to date information about your pay. You can use the service to check your most recent pay stub, see a history of all your previous payments and gather the data you need for tax or financial planning. Employers can use the service to provide their staff full electronic pay information and provide their employees an easy way to update personal information through the self-serve web app. Best of all – the service is free!
A few weeks ago we commissioned a study with Harris/Decima (the same folks who do political polling) to find out what employees really want when they view their pay statements. A surprising number of employees never received a proper statement or lost their statements because they were provided only on paper to them. More importantly, the vast majority of employees have difficulty understanding the arcane codes and abbreviations often used on their statements.
We knew we could do better. PayChequer gives employees a fresh view of their statements by presenting the most important information right up front (Net Pay!). We also provide useful data like vacation days and RRSP contributions to help make personal and financial planning easier.
We worked with several beta testers to ensure we presented meaningful data and made it easier for them to “glance” at their statement and get the information they needed.
In addition to presenting a better paystub, the service allows employees to securely change their address, access their pay history, print statements and receive important tax related documents like T4 / T4a statements. Employers no longer need to absorb the expense of sending paper documents, tracking tax documents etc. PaymentEvolution’s PayChequer does it for them.
Our beta testers have told us they love getting their statements this way. We think of it as an employee retention and attraction tool – if your staff is happy with how you present their pay, they’ll be more productive and view you as a progressive employer. Give PayChequer a spin and let us know what you think in our feedback and support community.
Like this:
Customer satisfaction
Engaging with our clients is the highlight of my day. We get emails, comments and questions all the time – and responding to them is our opportunity to connect and discuss what’s on their mind. In the payroll industry, clients ask questions ranging from specifics on interpreting payroll legislation to “what-if” scenarios with their employees. Managing responses to these questions is critical – but until now, we haven’t been able to share the wealth of common knowledge created by all these questions with our growing community of clients.
Some firms cope by creating “frequently asked questions” or post some generic help topics on their site. Unfortunately, this isn’t the most dynamic way to keep material updated and relevant to a large number of users. Worse, if its a new topic but relevant to a large number of clients, answering, posting and curating the response takes too long. This is where our strong community comes in. Changing our help system from static help to dynamic, user-powered support will allow our community to get more relevant answers, often from others in a similar situation.
Today, we’re unveiling our enhanced support service with the help of the good folks at GetSatisfaction.com. You can visit community.paymentevolution.com to participate in the community and experience better customer support. You can use the site to ask questions, share an idea, give us feedback and even report issues. Let us know how you like it!
We’re live!
It’s an exciting day for us at PaymentEvolution. As of today, we’re officially live and shedding the “beta” tag. http://bit.ly/9Xm7xZ
As part of the announcement we’re making our payroll service free to any Canadian small business with 5 or fewer employees – no time restrictions, no upselling, no additional fees. It’s our small way of giving something back and we hope you’ll use the service (and tell your friends).
Our dev team is working hard on more features which we’ll be unveiling in the coming months. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve, let us know.
Payroll lacks innovation
photo by Josh McConnell
When you look at the payroll market today its easy to see that the last real innovation was direct deposit – more than 20 years ago! Since then a small little thing called the “internet” emerged and we’ve all moved on to better and more streamlined ways to get things done. However, our payroll is stuck in 1990. Why?
How about your payslip? Look at that tired piece of paper – there’s probably only a few things on there that you really care about. Net pay? Vacation left? Yep. What if you wanted to know how much contribution room you had in your retirement plan? Or, the benefits you still have to excercise as part of your company plan? That piece of paper can’t do that.
Where is the innovation? Why can’t I get paid any way that I want? How about simply just doing this all online – no more paper forms to fill out, easy reporting for my taxes, sharing the data with my accountant … There’s a lot of pent-up frustration with payroll.
Watch this space 
No more Microsoft Accounting
photo by Ryan Mahoney (Flickr)
A few days ago Microsoft announced it would stop selling its Office Accounting package claiming that Excel is a better option for small businesses. This is a significant move that underlines the value of hosted services. Office Accounting was tied to the desktop which doesn’t match how we use services today. We tote netbooks and update our Facebook pages from our iPhones – relying on cloud services to get our work done.
Think about how you run your business today. You’re probably pointing clients to your website and juggling a lot of email each day. Having to install software on a desktop just to get your accounting done seems so … so 1998. Using cloud-based services frees you up – you no longer need to “patch” your accounting software and as rules change, the cloud service incorporates those changes faster than you can reboot your netbook.
Payroll is well suited for this cloud service wave - no small business really wants to worry about the complexity of payroll deductions, government remittances, keeping employee records etc. By moving this service to the cloud, we can take advantage of up-to-minute changes to payroll rules, process payroll from anywhere without having to install something, and give employees access to their own pay histories. It’s the freedom we’ve all come to expect now applied to payroll.
If you’re looking for a life raft after jumping ship from Office Accounting – check out cloud-based payroll from PaymentEvolution.
Sam Vassa
