Collaborate without compromising on payroll security using Zoho Payroll

Welcome to the next session of our Community Learning Series.

Today we will throw some light on how Zoho Payroll lets you collaborate with your distributed workforce and stay in control of payroll operations without compromising on the security of your employees' data.

As a Zoho Payroll user, your organisation will possess all the crucial information about your employees like bank account details, personal information, and salary details. Therefore, it is critical that this information stays secure. If it falls into the wrong hands, it can lead to identity theft or worse. This in turn can have adverse effects on your employees' trust and might damage your organisation's reputation.

To show how you can take control of your payroll operations in a secure way, we'll look at the below organisational hierarchy as an example.

The following table lists the responsibilities for each role as part of the payroll processing team.

From the table above, you can see that only the CEO requires complete access to all the modules. The remaining users need access only to specific modules based on their roles.

As the payroll admin of the organisation, the CEO can set up multi-level access in Zoho Payroll and allow the users in the organisation to access only selected data and functions. This way the CEO can maintain centralised control yet present the same user interface for all of the staff to get their work done. Distinctive user roles help cross-department staff can work in synergy without compromising the security of payroll data.

As your organization's CEO or payroll admin, here's how you can assign access for each of your user roles.

Log in to Zoho Payroll.

Under Settings, select Users and Roles.

Refer to our self-help resources for step-by-step guidance on creating multiple distinct user roles.

Once you have created all the roles within your organisation, let's define the permissions for each of the roles.

Payroll staff:

Let's assume that the responsibility of your payroll staff will be to maintain and update payroll records, validate payroll inputs, and get the pay run ready.

Your payroll staff will need to collect employee details and payroll inputs submitted through various sources, and then create a pay run with all the information collected.

They will need access to the following modules:

Employee module to maintain employee records.
Pay run module to create and edit pay runs.
Preferences module to collect employee reimbursement and POI data

Here you can allow the payroll staff to only view the basic employee details, but not create or edit them. This will ensure they cannot tamper with the employee data.

In the pay run module, you can decide that they can only create and edit the pay runs, not approve or pay them. When you move on to setting the permissions for the other roles, you'll probably give the payroll admin approval access for any pay run and give the finance team permission to make payments to the employees. Each role has a unique set of permissions based on its duties and position in the hierarchy.

Now that the different roles have been set, the admin can invite users into the payroll organisation.

Select Users under Users and Roles and start adding your employees under the different roles you have curated. All they have to do is accept the invitations they receive via email and create a Zoho account using the same email, and they are good to go.

Here's how the users will be seeing Zoho Payroll based on the roles that they've been assigned.

HR staff:

Can add new employee details while onboarding new staff to Zoho Payroll.

Payroll staff:

Can enter payroll inputs of employees, create and edit pay runs.

HR manager:

Can approve salary revisions, reimbursements and proof of investments. Has access to all reports.

Finance manager:

Can create, edit and delete employee loans and record salary payments.

External auditor:

Can access payroll, statutory and tax reports.

So the roles have been created, the users are added, and the admin knows which actions each user can perform. We haven't mentioned user tracking yet, but that's another kind of accountability that's available. If a discrepancy occurs in the payroll system, the payroll admin can check the activity log report to see exactly which actions each user has performed. All of this helps you keep your payroll data safe with Zoho Payroll.

Do let us know in the comments below how you have customised the roles in your payroll organisation.

Also, check out our previous post on a checklist to follow before hitting pay run here.

Until next time!