Delegating Responsibilities

Often it is the case that when you embark on home improvements there are jobs you can do yourself like filling, emulsioning the walls or glossing the paintwork: However, there are some specialised tasks like plastering or electrical work that are better completed by those who have the requisite skills and qualifications. Rewiring your home without the necessary knowledge would be foolhardy and potentially dangerous.

The same principles apply when considering the workflows and processes for business applications. At Bullet Web Development we develop tools with the consideration of the user’s journey at each point in the process.

Take, for example, our Smarter Recruitment™️ tool: Which we were commissioned to build for MCG’s recruitment arm to assist in the facilitation of resourcing to Medway Council.

This online tool allows an organisation to manage their temporary staff assignments in a simple and efficient manner. So, when looking to fill roles for their clients, CVs and candidate information can easily be communicated to the hiring managers, shortlists can be raised and then the assignments can be filled. Then when the assignment starts timesheets can be managed by the worker, approved by the manager and invoiced automatically.

This all works perfectly. However, when you hire people you have to pay them. To pay them you need a payroll system. This is where we delegate the appropriate responsibility. In the same way that it would be rather ambitious to rewire your own house without having some sort of electrical qualifications we would not consider building a payroll module into Smarter Recruitment™.

In a nutshell

Payroll systems can take all shapes and forms and are quite complex animals but they all essentially do much the same thing. On the face of it they take a bunch of parameters in such as hours worked and rates of pay etc, perform a calculation and then output another bunch of data including the net pay, deductions, such as tax and national insurance, and of course a payslip in some form so the worker knows how much they are paid.

Payroll interfacing

For Smarter Recruitment™ to be able to send payroll details to a payroll system we built a common interface to facilitate this action. One popular payroll system is Sage™ payroll which we already interface into but due to the common nature of our interface, we can interface to any payroll system that allows parameters to be passed to it.

Closing the loop

As I mentioned earlier a payroll system not only can take parameters in but can also, after calculations, produce output parameters which can then be fed back into Smarter Recruitment™ via the common interface. This is mainly useful for providing payslips for the workers so their assignments, rates and payment details can be stored in the same place and easily accessible.

In Summary

By leveraging an external tool via interfacing to perform specific tasks they are designed for can be a very powerful and flexible solution. If you want to change payroll providers then a common interface enables a quick and seamless transition. In this case, a payroll system provides all the updates to statutory changes and processing rules that would be difficult to maintain going forward. Its all about picking the right tools for the job.