How F&B Firms Can Save Time & Cut Costs With the Right HR Tech

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On top of the latest relief measures unveiled in Singapore Budget 2021, some food-and-beverage (F&B) firms are improving their business model to keep it sustainable through another challenging year. This includes capitalising on some of the technological developments that other restaurants and businesses have adopted.

After all, technology now plays a bigger role in both the home and the workplace; from meal purchases to salary disbursements, and shopping transactions to timesheet management. Furthermore, digitising workflows helps ensure that crucial company data – from individual payslips to staff shift schedules – is accessible wherever your teams are.

With technology driving everything more than ever, how can F&B firms save time and cut costs vis-a-vis their business model? The key lies in digitizing and simplifying admin-heavy HR processes, such as payroll processing.

Process payroll in the same amount of time it takes to fry an egg

Are you staying up late squinting at spreadsheets just to rush payroll? Because entering and editing data in Excel is a highly manual process, spreadsheets are extremely time-consuming. A payroll process shouldn’t take hours with the technology available today. If that is the case for your establishment, it’s time to go digital. There are free online payroll systems like Talenox that will help you automate salary disbursements in a few clicks.

Need to see it to believe it? Here’s how hours can be reduced to minutes in any F&B business’s payroll process when you use a payroll system like Talenox.

As a business, you’ll want these automated capabilities to optimise the time spent on payroll processing. That would help a business unshackle a lot of administrative burdens so that it can focus on growth and cash flow.

You’ll also want to ensure you adopt a grade ‘A’ payroll system in IRAS’s List of Supporting Payroll Software Vendors Employment Income, like Talenox; because that would mean your payroll software is legitimately compliant with the latest statutory requirements. This is a very important consideration to have. After all, you won’t want to receive a fine due to late or erroneous payments stemming from faulty payroll processing.

Automatically sync approved timesheets with payroll

In some F&B firms, it is important for the payroll process to take into account hourly wages. In that scenario, your HRMS should ideally track your employees’ work hours and calculate the salary figures accordingly. The last thing you want is the administrative burden of keying in the same data twice; in a time tracker and in your payroll process.

Thankfully, there are online tools that allow your time tracking and payroll system to talk to each other for faster and more accurate payroll processing; like the Deputy-Talenox integration.

This integration also ensures that all new leave applications approved in the Talenox Leave system are automatically reflected in Deputy’s scheduler. This allows you to view approved leave dates in Deputy’s time scheduler and see who’s available (or not) to cover shifts.

Unify your payroll and accounting processes

There are a lot of small F&B firms in the industry that do not put enough emphasis on keeping good accounts; hence, they remain complacent with a traditional, manual accounting system.

If that is the case in your business, this should be a cause for alarm. Because when you’re handling numerous business transactions a day, it can be incredibly time-consuming to record the account numbers and debits and credits for every transaction. It is also a highly tedious process that’s inherently vulnerable to human error. So it goes without saying that the accounting process has to be 100% error-free; after all, you’re trying to keep a clear idea of what the business is spending on each month.

Fortunately, there are online systems like Xero to automate accounting entries as well as push your payroll data from Talenox to your accounts so there are no extra numbers or missing decimal points. This automated accounting process doesn’t just help you reduce hours to minutes; it also helps to ensure the numbers you calculate at the end of the day are 100% accurate. That way, you’ll never have to worry about finding time to manually record and triple-check every business transaction again.

Take advantage of free HR tools for complex statutory calculation

It is important to stay on top of policy regulations and updates so your statutory calculations are accurate. If you’re running an F&B operation in Singapore, it is important to the following statutory calculations right. And thankfully, there are free tools available to help you with that.

Central Provident Fund (CPF) contribution.

The CPF is a mandatory social security savings scheme that both employers and employees contribute to. It serves to meet the retirement, housing and healthcare needs of each employed Singapore Citizen and Permanent Resident.

Whether you’re an employee or an employer, you need to calculate your CPF contributions with the most updated CPF contribution rates. Try the free CPF calculator designed by Talenox to accurately calculate CPF contribution; the calculator also calculates the Skills Development Levy (SDL) and statutory donations!

Salary Proration

A prorated salary is a portion of the full salary amount; in other words, the salary calculated to be proportionate to the number of days that the employee worked in an incomplete month of work. It is important to carry this out for accurate compensation.

Automatically prorate your wages according to your actual worked days with the Prorated Salary Calculator designed by Talenox. It is a free online calculator that caters to employers and employees of all industries, including the F&B industry.

Foreign Worker Quota & Levy

The Foreign Work Quote (FWQ) is essentially the number of S Pass and Work Permit holders a business can hire based off of the Dependency Ratio Ceiling (DRC), or quota. The Foreign Worker Levy (FWL) is then computed based off of your industry requirements and tiering of Basic- and High-skilled workers.

Try out the free online tool designed by Talenox for you to automatically calculate foreign worker quota and levy.