An estimated 60% of clubs who make the decision to change payroll providers do so effective January 1st. If your club is looking for reduced costs, improved efficiencies or better integration, now is a great time to evaluate your payroll process for January 1, 2011 improvements.

Because so many clubs are facing the challenge of shrinking budgets and decreased administrative staff levels, any opportunity to potentially reduce expense and save time deserves a closer look. Payroll processing is a great candidate to evaluate given the time consuming and tedious nature of handling a club's payroll.  

Should your club evaluate its payroll/HR systems?

Take a moment and consider when the last review of your current provider occurred. With some payroll companies, particularly some of the larger providers, fees seem to creep up each year. Payroll companies often offer discounts and low rates to acquire new clients with the strategy of increasing margin through add-on charges and price increases.

If your club has not evaluated their payroll provider in more than a year, then it is definitely time to take a fresh look and ensure your club is receiving the maximum value for return on investment. The following questions can help with making the decision to evaluate your club's current payroll provider and take a look at other options available.

• Has the pressure to decrease expenses been increased in the past year?
• Have administrative positions been reduced or eliminated?
• Has our club experienced any major payroll or tax issues during the past year? If so, how were they handled?
• When help is needed, are we assigned a "case number" or do we get responsive, professional help from someone who understands our business and how we work?
• Has our club experienced price increases over the past year or years? Are the increases reasonable and congruent with functionality and service enhancements?
• Are we being charged additional fees for basic functionality such as reports, direct deposit, and tax filings?

When to start the process for a January 1 conversion...

If your club is considering a January 1 conversion, the time to begin the process is now. In order to take a systematic approach, adequate time must be allowed to do your homework and research your payroll options before making a decision.

To allow adequate time to do a reasonable evaluation and cost/benefit analysis of making a change, you should target evaluating systems during the September/October time frame and make a decision no later than early November to be prepared for a January 1 conversion.

Budget a couple of weeks for information gathering and analysis. Following your research stage, set appointments with vendors to see the work flow and understand the specific strengths of each system.

Finally, request a detailed proposal to evaluate the soft and hard costs of a change. Don't fall into the trap of evaluating on price only but look at improved efficiencies, time savings, risk management, improved morale/retention and other factors that are related to the payroll and human resource function of your club.

What criteria drives the clubs' payroll decision?

As with any major decision, the first step is take an honest appraisal of your current system to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Once this step is completed, you can move forward with comparing your current solution to other available options.

Some considerations in evaluating companies for a fit with your club include:

• How easy is our system to use? Is our payroll partner really lifting an administrative burden off the club management team and administrative staff or are they just cutting paychecks?
• Does our solution include integrated features that help us manage our club more effectively such as HR management, labor management, and hiring and recruitment tools?
• Does our payroll partner understand our business? Do they accommodate multiple rates, multiple departments, weighted overtime and integration to our club management system?
• Are there other "clubs" using this provider? What has their experience been?

Kick the tires at ClubPay's 4th Quarter Webinar Demonstrations...

If you just want to kick the tires and see what your options are, ClubPay is offering a complimentary, no pressure, no hassle set of webinars in September. This will give you insight into our two most popular club management solutions - ClubPay and ClubTime. ClubTime is an integrated labor management and time keeping solution and ClubPay is our full-service outsource payroll solution.

Hope you found this post helpful; you can register for the webinars on our website at Attend a Webinar.