To Hell and Back: Conquering the Philippines Payroll Demon

Yes, I admit it-- I am just a newbie to the Philippines. 4 months count for very little and I have much more to experience as I continue to live here.

However, in that very short period of time, I have learned that Timekeeping, Payroll, and 201 File Management in the Philippines is hell on earth.

It is complex, time-consuming, prone to major errors, and yet it has to be done accurately, on time, month to month, with ABSOLUTELY no end in sight!

So, for heaven’s sake, please don’t do it manually or half-automated with Excel. It is simply not worth the time and effort, most especially when there’s technology readily available to simplify these tedious processes.

We recently sat down in-house and did some simulations for a typical 1000 person-company with the average PHP 30,000 salary in the Philippines. Though it’s not 100% accurate or applicable to every company the results were staggeringly scary:

• Savvy employees spend around 15 minutes every week managing their time-keeping such as asking about leave credits, making sure their logs are accurate, etc
• Inquiries affect Management and HR as well: it takes time to address these requests in aggregate
• Tracking payroll disputes can take several hours of work and several days of back-and-forth communication
• Manual timekeeping collectively costs at least 1,200 hours of productive work in a month
• On average, there is a 30% dispute rate for companies with this type of timekeeping
• Disputes collectively cost a further 600 hours on average to resolve, which costs companies over 5 million pesos a year!
• Compared to using Sprout’s platform, it costs approximately five times as much in employee time and productivity to calculate timekeeping and payouts out of a spreadsheet
• This totals to 1,800 hours of reclaimed man-hours per month
• What would you do with 225 man-days every month?
• With the Sprout platform, there is a 60% improvement in payroll calculation time, from 5 days to 2 days
• There will be improvements in payroll accuracy by a factor of 100
• 8.4kg of paper saved going paperless

… And this is only the numbers data. Scary huh?