One thing we have learned from past situations which disrupted business, such the Christchurch earthquake or even as far back as the Auckland Power Crisis (I still remember that one), is that they were incidents no-one saw coming and in some cases businesses were not prepared. In both of these cases there were businesses who could not access their offices and/or systems.
The issue with situations like we are currently experiencing is the UNCERTAINTY, yet there are things you can do to ensure you can continue to process your payroll.
If you have staff to you need to pay, you still have time to put in place some simple measures to make sure you can still process your pays. These include:
- Make sure you can answer the questions Who, What, When and Where in relation to processing your payroll and have a written plan. Google Docs is great for this as it can be easily shared and kept secure.
- If you run a PC based payroll make sure you have a copy of the payroll software on a laptop or PC away from the office. You may need to quickly move your processing to another location.
- Make sure you have good backups and keep copies offsite.
- Make sure you have all your payroll user codes and passwords written down somewhere safe and that they can be accessed by someone other than the person who processes the payroll if need be.
- Ensure you have more than one person who knows how to access sites like your online banking and IRD if needed.
- Ensure you have more than one person who is able to actually run the payroll on the off chance that your payroll person becomes sick.
- Have a list of key contact numbers and emails for the people who support your payroll and time & attendance software, as it is guaranteed if someone needs to take over they will need help.
- If you have been thinking about getting your payroll or time and attendance system into the cloud, don't wait until it is too late.
These are simple steps which will only take a few minutes to put into place (well except No.8) which could save you a world of pain.