NewsPod (Episode 2)

[00:00:00] Brian: welcome back folks to the news pod. What's up Walt? How you doing today? Doing well.

[00:00:05] Walt: Doing

[00:00:06] Brian: well. How about you, man? I'm good man. I'm good. Our news pod folks, we just built this to keep payroll folks informed on some current events, keep you thinking in payroll, keep you, just giving you little nuggets to digest through your days and then just keeping you sharp.

[00:00:21] Brian: That's all and go check out our other shows. We got long form shows. We're talking about payroll. We're talking incense or go subscribe or check us out on YouTube. Everywhere you listen to payroll podcasts. We are there. So without a further ado, I'll get into what I have to share for you for today.

[00:00:39] Brian: One of my first thing is how to improve your payroll process. If you're worried about if your processing is off, like if you're just worrying about your process, maybe your error rate is too high. And you're like, well, crap, man. I don't understand why I'm getting these errors. I can't figure out the root cause, la evaluate your process.

[00:00:59] Brian: Here are some [00:01:00] quick tips on what to look at. Automated payroll systems. A quick example of this is I had a friend recently that owns out, not owns, I'm sorry, runs a warehouse and they were like cutting checks, right? And the owner was literally writing them out. He was also using ADP and I was like, well, how are you using ADP literally means.

[00:01:24] Brian: What automated data product, right? Like how are you using ADP and you're not just have direct deposit and stuff like that. And he's I don't know. I was like, tell your boss to call ADP, get them on the, I'm sure the upgrade is really minimal. And you guys will be so much more efficient. Sure enough.

[00:01:41] Brian: He did, but we won't done. Now they got direct deposit and he ain't got to write a hundred checks every payroll, you know what I mean? So it's little things like that we may overlook that is a automated payroll situation and you can update and improve the process So another one is also yep. Another one also is [00:02:00] centralize your payroll data make sure that you are the guardian and the keeper of all that is Information, the payroll that comes to you, the backup, the all of your information, everything you want to keep it in one place, your folders, you want to encrypt the share drive, you want to organize that another great tip, implement time tracking system.

[00:02:21] Brian: If you're not using a time and attendance system right now, automated on your phone and mobile geofenced on locations, there's there. They are very affordable. Okay, very affordable. Down to, even if you have a five person shop, it's three bucks a month to, to, on some of these systems and probably even cheaper than that if you look hard enough.

[00:02:44] Brian: Time tracking systems, easy improvement to your process. Will absolutely help you synthesize processing. Another one is regularly update your payroll policies. You always want to ask yourself why? Me and Walt just went through a [00:03:00] or rather our culture at our company is just, we ask five why's every time, right?

[00:03:04] Brian: We got to ask the five why's. So build that into your payroll process. Another one is provide employee self service portals. This is my favorite. I love when employee self service came out and, I'm dating myself now. Me and walt have over 40 years of payroll experience. , when I started payroll.

[00:03:25] Brian: There was no employee self service. It was like a payroll had to do it. Yeah. You remember getting the direct deposit forms with. Cancel checks and having to type that we typed it in, we keyed it in, we rekeyed your banking information in with that in mind, do not skip pre note because I don't care what employee, how automated your processes for direct deposits.

[00:03:48] Brian: We've just discovered a business case through cyber security threats that actually pre notes help prevent. Some of the cyber security attacks that we've been having go check [00:04:00] out the shows on cyber security for that. We cover that in length. So again self service portals for sure.

[00:04:07] Brian: And then another one, a good one is conduct regular, oh, I did payroll audits already. No? No, conduct regular payroll audits. It reminds me of regularly updating the policies. That's why I thought I said it again. So conduct a regular payroll audits. You should already have an audit schedule in place. If you do not.

[00:04:26] Brian: This could be a big reason why you are suffering from any, error, an error rate. You should have weeklies by or by check date monthlies and quarterlies and annuals. If you have, if you're trying to stabilize something, if something is really bad, you want to do it, shoot daily, weekly, as much as you need until you get it stabilized.

[00:04:45] Brian: And then you can figure out what the better frequency is. That's,

[00:04:48] Walt: that's great. If I could chime in here. Yeah, go ahead. In the weeds. I remember the military, we, my, my supervisor in the military used to make us pull [00:05:00] random files. We used to actually keep a file for each sailor on the

[00:05:03] Brian: ship that we were on.

[00:05:04] Brian: Oh my gosh.

[00:05:06] Walt: And he would say, reach in the folder in the file cabinet and pull one name out. And we would have to audit that person's entire year of pay for that year. And we would catch a lot of

[00:05:16] Brian: different stuff. Really?

[00:05:19] Walt: Yeah. Yep. Just randomly. And we would catch.

[00:05:21] Brian: Wow. Yep.

[00:05:23] Walt: Wow. Make it made on the person's pay and stuff.

[00:05:26] Walt: And he was like, this is another way for you to catch stuff. And that was just a random audit that he would have us do it

[00:05:34] Brian: in

[00:05:34] Walt: addition to other standard audits that were in place. So just wanted to key that in there. Like you're

[00:05:39] Brian: going to find something. It's good. But it is crazy. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

[00:05:48] Brian: It reminds me, I didn't do it on purpose, but it reminds me of when I'm in, when I'm in spots where the data is bad, every time I run a census, like you find something and you're like, Oh my goodness. So yeah, it's. [00:06:00] Conduct regular payroll audits. It's a good one. Next one is provide training for your payroll personnel, right?

[00:06:07] Brian: Another requirement payroll folks, if you don't know you must stay it's continuing education is a requirement of this It's the nature of the beast. What's up? Number one pillar. Yep talent and training. That's right. Check out the website five Pillars of payrolls out there on the site for you in print, but we also talk about in shows.

[00:06:25] Brian: We got shows. We cover each pillar. We reviewed it. Go check it out. We use that to get out of the weeds when you get stuck and you're just like, what do I need to do? And then the last one is direct deposit, integrate direct deposit. You got employees. If you implement the employee self service, one of those things is direct deposit that greatly like it just really helps everything.

[00:06:47] Brian: And then now they even have same day pay. You can do, you can get some same day payments is, and that whole thing is evolving with earned wage access. As you evolve in your payroll process, you can look at [00:07:00] that. My other tidbit is really around AI, right?

[00:07:05] Brian: I haven't heard any companies yet, or more specifically, payroll or HR vendors that are integrating AI yet. Until now, Paylocity is integrating generative AI. They debuted in April of 2023. And right now, it looks like they're just soft, here in recruiting, and they're using it in their chat and their community features and things like that they as and that's what I'm seeing for these companies are using it in a small way as they build on it because it's machine learning, right?

[00:07:41] Brian: You want to teach this. Machine learning, the AI, how payroll is done, little things to get them going and as they go along, they're increasing what they're using it for. So just look out for them. Paylocity is leading the way with getting generative AI embedded into their software.[00:08:00]

[00:08:00] Brian: And then, well, a really good fundamentals excel, right? I was working, I'm in Excel every day. And as I was preparing for the pot, I said, you know what I see folks in my team that. Don't use Excel the same way I do. So I said, you know what? Let me throw some tips out there.

[00:08:18] Brian: I use filters a lot, right? I put filters on, have your data organized properly, right? I use filter and I just want to share, look, I use filters to look up values quick and a long list, right? If you're like doing audits and you're like, wait, I should not have a certain value here. Why would you scroll through thousands of rows of, no, just look at the filter.

[00:08:36] Brian: And it's, and the filter is good because it combines it by unique data. If there's a thousand rows of yes. In your filter, you're only going to see one. Yes, so it's a quick way to see if you have any variance in your columns. Another thing is quickly sorting data. I see folks highlighting the data thing and then going to sort and then picking the headers and then I'm like.

[00:08:59] Brian: We're wasting [00:09:00] like 30 seconds. If you had the filter there, you'd be done already. It'd be two seconds to get what you need. And then you have here advanced filtering. Yeah. I wanted to

[00:09:08] Walt: talk about that, but you had one more step in there about chat GPT.

[00:09:11] Brian: Nope. That was a personal note to me that I didn't read last time.

[00:09:16] Brian: Yeah, it's all good. My bad.

[00:09:17] Walt: This is probably for the more advanced people that are in Excel. So there's a way that you can create advanced filtering in Excel. So there's lots of tips out there that you could use, but to apply 1 or more events filters to your data.

[00:09:34] Walt: You would navigate to filter and sort grouping under the data tab. And you would select a tool labeled advanced, and then you would go from there. There's lots of helpful tools out there on the internet. There's lots of Excel gurus out there.

[00:09:49] Brian: Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of those on YouTube. For

[00:09:51] Walt: sure.

[00:09:52] Walt: They can help you walk through this. But yeah great Excel tips, Brian, on filtering.

[00:09:56] Brian: Yeah. And that's why I was like, I'm not going to get too crazy, but just hey[00:10:00] use filters. Because to that point, there's so many things in Excel. I remember nailing an interview question once and they were like, oh, you're good at Excel and I'm like, yeah, as good as you can be, nobody ever knows all of Excel and the manager was like, yeah, you're right, good answer.

[00:10:14] Brian: You know what I mean? So it's I'm always, I follow five people on TikTok for freaking Excel. And they always saying different things, you know what I mean? All right, that's all I got for you today, folks. What do you got for us? Well, so I have a few things. The 1st

[00:10:27] Walt: is that ADP who we know is a global leader in HR and payroll.

[00:10:32] Walt: They proudly secured the esteemed global payroll supplier of the year award. At the Global Payroll Association Awards of 2023 this is significant for them because it's the 2nd consecutive year that they've won this award in a row. As we know, you and I both know we've been in this game a long time.

[00:10:52] Walt: ADP is 1 of the. The truest and oldest systems in the industry, and they've been here a long time. [00:11:00] So I think for them to win this two years in a row is a significant victory. I just wanted to shout them out on here for

[00:11:06] Brian: doing that. The next thing

[00:11:08] Walt: in it's in line with our true payroll crime stories.

[00:11:11] Walt: So I saw this on the do l. gov, the U S department of labor. Recovered over half a million dollars in back wages and liquidated damages for almost 150 people employed by one of Utah's largest Asian and grocers after the agency filed suit to stop the employer from interfering in an investigation about their compliance.

[00:11:37] Walt: Basically, this. This company was doing stuff that violated the or the fair labor standards act and they were interfering with their employees during the investigation. So they were telling their employees to lie to the because they were doing they were. Shorten their hours. They were paying straight time instead of overtime.

[00:11:59] Walt: They were doing a lot [00:12:00] of shady stuff here. And, so I just don't understand Brian, why these employers do this and they don't want to pay their damn employees, man. Yeah.

[00:12:08] Brian: What I'm saying? It's, we say it's greed. I try to give them a benefit of doubt. Oh man, they, maybe they're not, poor planning, but.

[00:12:14] Brian: We're we've seen too many stories of owners of business owners just straight not paying overtime like it's right, I've heard managers in the past and some companies that were just like, Oh I go in and change time cards because we have a no overtime policy. And I'm like no, you cannot do that.

[00:12:34] Brian: You have to pay the overtime and then you coach the, you can put the employee on a, performance and all that you can coach them and eventually terminate them if they're taking, if they're working overtime without permission, but you can't not pay them. You know what I mean? Thank you.

[00:12:49] Brian: That's a good one, man. Thanks. Oh, the

[00:12:51] Walt: last one I have is that the U. S. C. I. S. Otherwise known as the United States Citizenship and [00:13:00] Immigration Service announced a new form I nine, which will allow permanent citizens Remote review for E Verify

[00:13:10] Brian: users. That's a new form

[00:13:13] Walt: will become available Tuesday, August 1st, and eligible keyword eligible employers may use the remote review alternative that same day.

[00:13:25] Walt: So that means it will be available for use on August 1st,

[00:13:30] Brian: as soon as it rolls out. So for eligible employees, so make sure you look up and see if you're eligible. But that's cool. That's a big win. That's a big win for payrollers. Yep.

[00:13:41] Walt: We have a couple of fun topics down here, right? So you want to go first with yours or do you want me to go first with mine?

[00:13:46] Walt: How do you want to do that?

[00:13:48] Brian: Well, it's really just one. The other thing is I missed a tip that I wanted to share and it was just. We [00:14:00] talking about cyber security a lot and we were like, yeah, make sure encrypted. Yes. Encrypted is good work. Absolutely. I think it was like the case with Hunter Biden right now and all that controversy nonsense is going on with him.

[00:14:14] Brian: It came up in that something that he thought was encrypted got shared and it's well, yeah, it's encrypted, but you can't control what the other person is doing on the other side of that encryption. It's end to end encrypted. But if at one end, if I get a text that's encrypted using the app, I can screenshot, I can take some other device and take a picture of that.

[00:14:36] Brian: Like now it's not encrypted because now I took a picture of it and sold it, send it to my buddy. Or I sold it to the inquirer, you know what I mean? That's a perfect example.

[00:14:44] Walt: You're right because we can get an encrypted email with a file in there like we do all the time. And you can open that attachment, screenshot it with the snippet tool or whatever you need to do and download or download the actual file from that encrypted email.

[00:14:59] Walt: And then [00:15:00] it loses that encryption power, right?

[00:15:03] Brian: Now he was saying stupid stuff. So it's encrypted or not. You shouldn't say stupid stuff. So like folks, really and Walt knows I'm not a big fan of WhatsApp at work because it becomes these unofficial chat things that the company is not regulating.

[00:15:20] Brian: They're not sanctioning these chats in these rooms and or on WhatsApp. And it's cool if you have a good team and la, but it can be very careful with those. Yeah, especially

[00:15:32] Walt: on your personal devices, right? Yes. Because these applications that we have on our phones, they have access to certain things.

[00:15:40] Walt: And if you don't read all the stuff they have access to and you download them, they have access to certain files that everything you download, everything that you do in the incognito thing, they

[00:15:52] Brian: have access to that. That's right. You got to be careful. . That was it. Yeah, you go.

[00:15:58] Walt: So first [00:16:00] time, just yesterday there was a congressional hearing about UFOs, sir.

[00:16:06] Walt: That Yeah. What do you think about that? ?

[00:16:09] Brian: It's nuts. It's nuts. For me, seeing his believing, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I believe they exist, but it's are we going to, are, is, are they real? Is it real? I don't know. I don't know. We don't

[00:16:21] Walt: know. I've heard so many varying opinions on it.

[00:16:24] Walt: I, I don't believe that we're the only intelligent life in the galaxy or the universe, but how real it is that they're here. I don't know. I've heard so many other things that it's a control tactic. It's so many different things that I've heard who knows, like you said, the group is in the pudding until some little.

[00:16:44] Walt: People come down on a ship and why they gotta

[00:16:46] Brian: be little people like that's messed up, bro. You see what I'm saying, man? Yo, you messed up, man. But it's funny, right? Cause we talking UFOs and it's funny cause it's, it is weird. Cause I was just thinking [00:17:00] of this today. I was just like, wait, there's no payroll in the Star Trek world.

[00:17:04] Brian: Not star Wars. I'm a Trekkie. I like both. Well, I Star Trek more, but I appreciate Star Wars and all that stuff, but Star Trek, right? It was an episode. I think it was an episode or a movie in Next Generation. Picard was explaining to somebody that, they're like, what happened to money?

[00:17:20] Brian: They went back in time because time travels real and, there's universes as they went back in time and they're like, what happened to money or something with money or whatever? And he's well, we've eradicated everything. And we, we have one goal. Around space exploration and just, making humanity better or whatever.

[00:17:38] Brian: And it was like, well, then there's no payroll. Not that we would clearly we wouldn't be out of a job they're using everybody efficiently and everything all like that you'd be useful you do something else you count a different type of bean. You know what I mean, we'll still be being counters we just, we would do it somewhere other you know some other way.

[00:17:57] Brian: So it was this weird you know where you brought up UFOs and [00:18:00] I was just thinking about that today. So I guess, and that's probably why, because of the UFO talk from yesterday. Yeah, and that's it, man. Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's it, folks. That's it for the news pod. We hope that we've have shared something with you that that's a little tidbit.

[00:18:18] Brian: Thank you for joining us. Go subscribe, tell a friend, check out our shows, check out the site. Yeah, let us know what you think. Reach out and touch someone. ET, call home. Peace, brother. Love you guys.