Payroll Vs. HCM or HR Software: What’s the Difference? And Which Software is Right for Your Business?
Employees are central to your company’s success, and a vital aspect of keeping your teams happy is ensuring that they’re paid for their work, correctly and on time each pay period. Managing employee payroll and benefits, and properly accounting for these important aspects of your business is key for not only pleasing your staff but also making sure that you’re in compliance with the state and federal tax regulations that apply to payroll and benefits administration in your region.
There are several different types of software available that can help streamline your payroll and other HR duties, some of the powerful payroll software names include:
● Payroll Software
● Human Resources (HR) Software
● Human Capital Management (HCM) Software
While some components of these powerful payroll software solutions do tend to overlap (or even integrate with one another), each has its own set of unique services and benefits. Understanding the difference between each of these systems will help you gain insight into which software (and tools) will benefit your business most.
Tell us what you're looking for and we'll offer you personalized software recommendations.
What is Payroll Software?
Payroll software solutions are designed to help companies process payroll more efficiently and also provide tools that simplify tax calculations, compliance, and filing. Payroll cloud software is available as a stand-alone solution with features tailored specifically to payroll processing, but it can also be part of a larger suite of tools for managing employees throughout their time at your company.
Payroll software for large companies typically includes the following features, capabilities, and automation:
● Payroll processing
● Direct bank disbursements
● Tax compliance
● Tax calculations and filing
● Integration capabilities
● Reporting and analytics
What is Human Resources (HR) Software?
Human Resources (HR) software provides a more robust offering of tools that are centered on managing all the details associated with employees, from the moment of being hired until their time with the company is complete. Many HR software tools include payroll processing as part of their full suite of tools and applications, while others can be integrated with a payroll software of your choosing to provide and track payroll services in addition to other HR tasks. HR software as the top payroll software typically includes features like:
● Employee hiring and onboarding
● Employee management and training
● Time and attendance
● Benefits and retirement package administration
● PTO (Vacation, sick time, medical leave, etc)
● Payroll and tax compliance
● Reporting and analytics functions
What is Human Capital Management (HCM) Software?
HR and HCM software systems are often considered the same in terms of functionality and the tools included in a full suite of applications for every aspect of HR. However, Human Capital Management (HCM) software as a popular SaaS payroll software typically offers a more robust and comprehensive suite of tools and features (along with workforce automation and advanced reporting) that can help you manage the full spectrum of your human assets.
Difference between Payroll Vs. HCM Vs. HR Software
Different businesses of different sizes and belonging to different industries have different goals, so if you’re thinking of a new capital management solution, you must ensure it performs exactly the same job for what you are buying it. Here’s a short HR, HCM and pay comparison to give you a clear idea of which software payroll services are best for your business.
- HR Software: this software serves as a system of record. As an attendance and payroll software, it has employees’ data and allows its availability for business processes and other operations requirements. For instance, it may link with your payroll software to cater banking details for direct deposit.
- Payroll software: payroll software comparison shows that payroll software offers many updated features as compared to others. It captures raw time data and gross pay from another system or dynamically logged data and evaluates net pay after applying appropriate taxes and deductions.
- HCM: to best compare payroll software, next on our list is HCM. It’s a fusion of payroll software and HR software with extra functions like scheduling, talent management, recruiting and attendance and time management. HCM is believed as the best payroll software for large companies for its additional and advanced features.
Payroll Vs. HCM Vs. HR Software: Which is Right for Your Business?
Hundreds of payroll software companies are offering software with different features, and settings and fulfilling different business needs. After the above comparison of payroll software, we believe that payroll software is a competitive & efficient solution all in all.
Payroll software is a great solution for companies that need the ability to pay employees on a regular schedule and automate the manual work that comes along with the basics of processing payroll and reporting to governing bodies on necessary taxes. Small to medium businesses that simply need a better way to pay employees and simplify things at tax time can achieve great benefits from using an affordable payroll software system.
This business critical solutions works for every organization. Businesses can pay their employees timely and accurately to avoid poor performance, low morale, and legal and reputational difficulties. Payroll software helps businesses by quickly working out deductions and payroll calculations, calculating expenses, bonuses, and holiday pay. It automates particular tasks, for example, a year-end reporting, and minimizes the burden of compliance. Payroll software stores data such as annual reports and payslips and excludes the need to learn complex tax legislation.
If you have a medium to a large company, then you’ll have more complex HR needs, including recruiting, hiring, payroll, benefits, tax compliance, and more. In these cases, using an HR or HCM software solution can bring all of your human resources tasks into a singular system, which along with workforce automation and advanced reporting tools, will help your HR team manage employees and all the intricacies of HR in a more efficient, streamlined fashion.
Payroll software also offers additional services and analysis to make payroll data more useful for businesses.
About Wheelhouse
Like what you just read? At Wheelhouse, we are passionate about all things software, and our specialty is connecting software buyers to an enterprise solution that perfectly matches their needs.
Please visit our Payroll Software page for a complete list of all the solutions we recommend. Questions? Drop us an e-mail at info@wheelhouse.com and we’ll be happy to assist you!