How back-office software can improve your efficiency?

This pattern is particularly noticeable in the aviation sector and in retail as the holiday season approaches. The pressure to scale up workforces quickly while ensuring the right people are hired can be overwhelming. To tackle this challenge effectively, businesses need to streamline their hiring processes and consider essential elements like background checks for seasonal workers.

"A lot has changed since 2008 but the flexible facility provided by Giant Finance+ means we have been able grow at a pace that suits us. Their ongoing support and industry expertise has been instrumental to the success of our business."

Applicant tracking system

Recruiting the right candidate can be resource-heavy and time-consuming making it expensive. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are becoming more and more sophisticated and an increasingly important tool in the move towards simplifying the recruitment process for both the recruiter and the candidate.

For the candidate, an ATS offers a secure and convenient way to apply for jobs. Candidates complete their applications online, answer any relevant job-specific assessment questions, and upload their CV.

For employers, the ATS enables recruiters to post jobs online, receive and score applications, screen candidates, progress applications, communicate with candidates, arrange interviews, and manage the offer and hiring process online.

The benefits

1. An ATS will save you time and money by freeing up resources previously spent on manually processing candidates
2. An ATS will greatly reduce the administrative element of the recruitment process
3. Recruiters can screen candidates and keep all documentation in one place improving the quality and control of the recruitment process
4. Screening questions can be added to eliminate unqualified candidates
5. Recruiters can select CVs based on selected keywords
6. A good reporting engine provides reports to show things like diversity statistics, applications at each stage of the process, and the source of the application

Onboarding contract management

A tangible contract management solution saves time, mitigates risk, and improves compliance. Simple to use and secure system with everything in one place makes the task of managing contracts easier and quicker. By swiftly dealing with contracts it helps avoid any issues from developing.

Utilising a contract management solution means you can keep track of important dates – this could include right-to-work and assignment end-dates. It is important that businesses manage contracts sufficiently throughout the entirety of it's life cycle. Having a contract management system in place is advantageous when it comes to supplier disputes, senior management requests for information, and audits.

The benefits:

1. Eliminate errors within contracts
2. Keep track of important dates like work permits including reminders
3. Significantly improve efficiency and productivity
4. Maintain up-to-date content
5. Record and retrieve data quickly and accurately
6. Guarantee 100% compliance by making entries and acceptance mandatory

An onboarding system lets you offer any type, quantity, or combination of documents for online review and acceptance by the worker including the ability to match the hirer’s specific contractual requirements with the worker and eliminate any potential risk to your business.

Optional mandatory completion means compliance is guaranteed and the time and costs associated with manually preparing, chasing, logging, and storing documents is eliminated.

Timesheet management

Highly flexible cloud-based timesheet management systems provide a multitude of timesheet layouts, multi-level authorisation, complex pay rates, and processing options to meet hirer, agency, and worker needs via secure portals and mobile apps, on a standalone, modular or integrated basis.

There are many factors to consider when deciding to move to an online timesheet management platform.

The benefits:

1. Accuracy - with time tracking software, 100% accuracy is guaranteed and eliminates errors with invoices (and/or self-bill invoices to suppliers) being raised quickly and accurately
2. Productivity - significantly reduce debtor days, improve cash flow and lower costs
3. Expenses and non-time-based payments such as bonuses can also be managed in the same flexible way as timesheets
4. Eliminate paper - a flexible cloud-based timesheet management system offers an end-to-end solution for processing and approving employee or contractor time and work. Removing paper-based systems will save your business hours of admin work and helps with lowering costs and eliminating errors
5. Review a suite of reports letting you know your vital statistics like missing timesheets, how many are outstanding approval, and much more
6. Flexibility – SMS reminders and various timesheet formats and ways to electronically approve them to suit you and your clients

Billing management

With a billing management system in place, you can benefit from an all-in-one, integrated solution that manages invoices efficiently and accurately. A multi-currency, flexible, cloud-based solution will improve accuracy and speed up the billing operation process. By investing in better technology, time can be saved and debts can be collected quicker.

Adopting a billing management system means reducing admin to save time and eliminating manual data entry to remove errors. With an organised system, it can be easily accessed and will streamline the creation and sending of invoices to meet each hirer requirement.

A billing management solution will collect and process your data, providing an easy flow for invoice generation.

The benefits:

1. Cost-effectiveness – save time and money and record everything online
2. Instant invoicing – send invoices to clients immediately, error-free, and collect your cash quicker!
3. Security – protect your financial data with multiple layers of security
4. Improved access to your financial data with bespoke reporting features
5. Multiple invoice layouts to choose from
6. Tap into a global, flexible cloud-based multi-currency billing system with in-built purchase order management, self-bill, and consolidation options

Payroll

Running payroll requires a specialist set of processes and suitably qualified staff. For many recruitment agencies, this isn’t your core competency and the resources required to run payroll efficiently can be substantial and payroll errors can be costly. Partly as a consequence of this, significant numbers of recruitment agencies are turning to third parties to handle their payroll functions for them.

Outsourcing this function in full means your chosen third party will manage all aspects of your payroll including the calculations, processing, payments, answering queries, and HMRC filing and submissions. If you want to keep some of the control in-house, you can outsource the calculation part and then process and pay your candidates yourself.

The benefits:

1. With experts calculating your payroll, accuracy will increase meaning happier workers and less time correcting mistakes
2. If your current payroll process includes a lot of paper then outsourcing will help future proof by introducing innovative software into the process
3. You can get back to what you love. You are passionate about recruitment, not payroll so outsourcing your payroll means you can focus on recruiting and growing your business
4. You could be saving money! If you consider the time spent, paper, printing, and the cost of correcting mistakes, having a 3rd party complete payroll could eliminate all of these!
5. The ability to expand the payroll into countries outside the UK
6. A good third-party payroll provider will have built-in payroll disaster recovery to ensure your workers always get paid on time

Reporting

Whether it’s measuring ROI for your business, the number of candidates you have placed over a certain period, or your gross margin, having reporting capabilities are crucial to the success of your business.

The daily tasks that you and your team complete creates a lot of data and without a suitable reporting function it’s difficult to put this data to good use. Having a full selection cloud based reporting available to you means all of your data is in one place and ready for analysis whenever you need it.

When it comes to reporting functionality one size certainly does not fit all! It’s important you can customise your dashboards to give you the information you need quickly and in a way that suits you. Having a visual representation of how your business is performing helps keep your team on track and working effectively.

The benefits:

1. Providing both granular and top-level tracking of data
2. Restrict reporting access depending on user type
3. Keep track and measure key performance indicators
4. Get real-time information about your business on any device
5. Increased understanding of risks and opportunities
6. Streamline processes, reduce costs and improve efficiency