Small and medium enterprises now have an easier time complying with government regulations with the official launch of Payroll for Small Businesses by Sprout Solutions at the Department of Information and Communications Technology’s Tech Advantage summit last Thursday.
Sprout Solutions is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company based in the Philippines that aims to help businesses through their suite of innovative HR and payroll management solutions.
Payroll for Small Businesses is part of Sprout’s advocacy for improving businesses in the Philippines by giving them access to solutions that will help them grow. Small businesses don’t always have enough resources to efficiently process payroll, which is why Sprout is offering their payroll module for free until they are ready to avail of the full range of services.
“Sprout has always been about impacting Filipino lives by improving business, and the way we want to do this now is by giving smaller businesses a way to focus more on strategic thinking,” said Patrick Gentry, co-founder and CEO of Sprout Solutions. “We were also quite small not too long ago, and we understand how tough it is to handle more people, which is why we decided to offer Payroll for Small Businesses without charging until a client grows beyond 50 people,” he added.
According to the 2018 List of Establishments of the Philippine Statistics Authority, medium-sized and smaller enterprises make up 99.52% of registered businesses in the Philippines. Many SMEs simply lack the manpower to efficiently process payroll while allowing their HR to focus towards strategic responsibilities like skill and capacity building.
Sprout’s main direction has always been to help businesses by solving problems with compliance. Avoiding non-compliance can bog down budding businesses because of the time and effort it takes to carry out the iterative tasks of payroll and timekeeping. This problem is even more critical for smaller businesses that need to focus resources on operational concerns rather than administrative tasks.
Getting Payroll for Small Businesses up and running takes only five to 10 days, and users can expect support throughout the entire onboarding process, and any time that help is needed with the payroll process. A mixed team of Prince2-certified project managers, expert payroll advisers, and product support staff are ready to address any concerns regarding both the software and payroll.
Aside from the web-based signup and verification, which allows users to initiate the process from the comfort of their own homes, Sprout reaches out to provide basic setup instructions and free payroll training. Sprout also provides a self-onboarding tool, which walks new users through the software’s interface, and access to an extensive knowledge base for both the software and Philippine payroll requirements.
For more visual learners, users can opt to use Sprout Academy, a learning management solution, which provides a more comprehensive learning experience.
“We’re there every step of the way to help out with anything related to the payroll process,” said Gentry. “The way we help businesses isn’t just about giving them the tools to work with; we also want to help them learn how to use those tools,” he added.
Sprout’s payroll solution offers businesses the ability to easily overcome the compliance problem by automating the payroll process, including automatic generation of over 20 government reports and calculation of 32 different pay rates. Business can leverage the technology to navigate tricky regulations that stifle an HR department’s ability to focus on enriching the employee knowledge pool.
“We’ve always focused on compliance because it’s such a huge weight on small businesses,” said Gentry. “We want to see HR departments focus on other important value-adding tasks, not just encoding spreadsheets over and over again.”
It’s not just the automated payroll that helps businesses comply with government requirements, because aside from tax and contributions, the Data Privacy Act of 2012 has mandated companies to adhere to strict standards when it comes to protecting sensitive data. However, with Sprout’s cloud-based 201 file database management and ISO 27001 certification for information security, users can rest assured that their data remains secure.
Sprout Solutions aims to impact Filipino lives through helping businesses redirect resources to skill and capacity building. By alleviating the burden of resource-heavy and repetitive payroll and timekeeping responsibilities, companies can now have their HR departments invest in developing people, leading to improved employee confidence, low employment turnover, which ultimately saves businesses time and money.