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HM Digest

HumanManager introduces exciting features, deepens strategic partnerships to improve customer satisfaction

To empower organisations to stay ahead of innovations and excel in today’s dynamic business environment, we have rejigged HumanManager, a robust employee-focused HR and payroll software. with innovative features.

This announcement was made during the Breakfast with HumanManager event themed ‘HR and Lifestyle’ held recently in Lagos.

The event hosted business leaders and professionals from diverse industries, including — Ali Baba, GCFR; Dipo Jolaosho, General Manager, Business Development, MTN; Jacklyn Okafor, Managing Director, Cyberbyte Software Limited; Boluwaji Apanpa, Partner, People & Change, KPMG Nigeria; Prof Afọlábí Oladapo, Former Head of Service, Nigeria; and Olufemi Alabi, Partner, Transaction Advisory Service, Ernst & Young Nigeria.

Ernest Ndukwe, Group Chairman, SystemSpecs Holding Limited (SHL); ‘Deremi Atanda, Managing Director, Remita Payment Services Limited (RPSL) and Demola Igbalajobi, Managing Director, SystemSpecs Technology Services Limited (STSL) were also present at the event.

READ MORE: 7-must-have-hr-modules-for-your-organisation

John Obaro, our Group Managing Director, guided the audience through the evolving history of HumanManager, which at her inception set out as SpecPay, a payroll solution, to SpecsMan and SpecsPen. HumanManager was then birthed as a comprehensive HR and payroll solution for organisations of any size.

“From the previous successes of over three decades, HumanManager is positioned to meet the transforming demands of people management and has cemented its position as Africa’s premier HR and payroll software. To achieve this, we registered HumanManager as a corporate entity in October 2022 and appointed Adekunbi Ademuluyi as Managing Director,” he added.

Adekunbi Ademuluyi, our Managing Director, in her remark, unveiled a business remodel that revolves around the entire employee life cycle and new services which include learning, financial services, resume management, process and policy templates services, and mobile application services, amongst others.

“HumanManager 7.0 new features demonstrate our commitment to innovation by infusing lifestyle solutions with HR and payroll services for organisations of any size, structure, and location.

Jipo Jolaosho, General Manager, Sales and Distribution MTN Nigeria; Olagunju Waheed, Board Chairman, HumanManager Limited; Adekunbi Ademiluyi, Managing Director, HumanManager Limited; Ali Baba, Entertainer and Entrepreneur; John Obaro, CEO and Founder, SystemSpecs Holding Company; Jacklyn Okafor, Managing Director, Cyberbyte Software Limited; ‘Deremi Atanda, Managing Director, Remita Payment Services Limited

“HR was just about employing people, but the workplace has changed. Our lifestyle has changed, and we have to adjust our work-life balance. We have added these new features to help organisations across Africa and beyond access the best suite of HR and related services in line with employees’ and employers’ needs. They include learning, remote work management, resume management, intuitive process and policy templates, and lots more,” she added.

With nearly 30 years of experience helping organisations across Africa simplify their payroll and human resource processes, the latest version offers the flexibility to select specific service segments according to needs and budget. These include the Basic, Premium, and Enterprise modules that provide tailor-made business solutions, making HumanManager an excellent value proposition.

READ MORE: why-you-should-be-a-hr-business-partner-today

Adekunbi added that the employee-friendly design, combined with the latest technological advancements, will enable HR professionals better to integrate their practices into the lives of their employees.

“We believe that this will lead to improved organisational performance, making HumanManager the ideal solution for businesses looking to stay ahead in today’s dynamic business environment,” she stated.

HumanManager has forged strategic partnerships with Migo, Zercoms, Tangerine, Stanbic, Cashconnect, Coursera, AWS, and MTN to further enhance the user experience.

In 2022, HumanManager was recognised for its outstanding contributions to the industry and awarded the “Best Workforce Benefits Management Solution” at the Nigerian Fintech Awards. With the launch of HumanManager 7.0, the software is poised to build on this tradition of excellence and revolutionise HR and payroll management across the continent.

To automate your payroll and HR processes as well as stay updated with evolving technology, visit www.humanmanager.net

Categories
Innovation

Workplace Trends you should Look Forward to in 2022

The global post-COVID landscape has utterly changed many businesses. From the new normal to conversations around prioritising employee’s mental health, providing relevant perks, the great resignation, enhanced technology tools for staff and customers, and many more, the modern workplace — now more innovative and evolving — will never remain the same!

Suffice to say that 2022 will see a lot of these supposedly temporary adaptations becoming part of the norm. Could this be good news? Yes, I think.

Here are some workplace trends in 2022 and what they might mean for you:

1. Hybrid & Remote-work-first model

2021 did not only prove that employees could be trusted to work remotely, it showed that majority of workers might want to hold on to that model. Just as the number of remote-first companies have multiplied, even more are opting for a hybrid work system.

This implies that hybrid and remote work are here to stay, but the question now is: “How many days should employees work from the office or at home? Dynamic businesses and human resource managers are open to negotiate with their staff on how to work, instead of imposing a straight jacket option for all.

2. Workers having more than one job

Remote work has helped employees save work travel time, which in turn became an opportunity to get extra jobs either owned by the employee or another company. This has inherently widened the talent marketplace as individuals can work beyond their borders, and in different time zones.

As they multitask and split their time appropriately between employers, individuals have a duty to ensure that having more than one job doesn’t have an impact on their ability to perform well in each role.

3. The Great Resignation

One of the post-COVID effects is that employees had time to review their growth process and decide if they want to switch career or continue in their chosen path. This led to the ‘Great Resignation’ and increased competition in the marketplace.

The Great Resignation is empowering workers as more people switch careers and make bold career decisions. The result is that employers now offer better working conditions and incentives to maintain and keep performing staff. The rise of the four-day work week in some companies is proof of this.

4. Improved employee welfare management

Office perks, unlike before, are no longer essentially linked to the buildings in which work is done. So, if you are aiming for happier employees in 2022, there needs to be a mindset shift when it comes to benefits. This could be in terms of flexible work hours or days, competitive salaries, recognition of highly performing staff, contribution to household bills especially when a company cuts down on office work days, wellbeing and mental health benefits or support at work!

5. Skills over roles

There is a big change in how work is assessed as more business managers are now concerned with what potential staff can do, not just what they have done. Skills are germane to drive organisation’s competitive edge and the workflow that makes that happen.

Employees therefore need to develop critical skills that potentially open up multiple opportunities for their career advancement, rather than preparing for a specific type of role they desire.

If you’re preparing for a major career change, you should carry out some research to find out which skills are most important to your future career.

6. Technology growth in the workplace

There is also an increasing technology adoption by businesses and for their customers. For instance, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics are creating more jobs and helping businesses scale up comfortably and efficiently. These jobs include web development, UI/UX design, UX writing for chatbots, and more.

The insights above are some of the major features of the modern workplace emerging.

What is your business doing differently to key into these changes? How are you as an individual leveraging these changes for your career advancement? Are there more workplace disruptions to look forward to?

Kindly share your thoughts in the comment section.

Categories
Managing Teams

Remote vs Office — My Preference & Why

You’ve probably had that moment when you woke up in the morning of a work day after hearing your alarm go off and wished it was a weekend. Then, you put off the alarm and went right back to bed.

Well, many times, you may have shaken off the thought and prepared for work instead to later join the usual traffic of the city that never sleeps.

You may however feel lighter if you find yourself in the same situation, but now you have to work from home. The thrill and feel of being in control of your time and space is second to none!

Working from home has its perks — the one that stands out is that you don’t have to go through the stress of going to another location just to do your job; rather you work from your preferred location (usually at home), manage your time effectively, complete your tasks for the day and then you are fine. Also, you can envelop yourself from your colleague always doing ‘notice-me’ to be perceived as hard-working or that colleague that likes to bring up random gist during work hours.

However, there are flip-sides to it. There is something quite interesting about congregating in a physical office with co-workers to exchange ideas, observe and learn directly from one another. There is a way a physical space more easily enables collaboration and social skills.

Yes, I heard you thinking all these could happen if they took place virtually as well.

Remote work although more convenient, requires a great deal of discipline to remain productive despite distractions that might not come up in the physical work place. More so, the more usual instant feedback you get from your boss in an office space may not be the same; communication with team members can also be inhibited due to network instability and distractions, and the need to constantly invest on data and stable power supply to keep up with work can be nerve-wracking.

For me, working remotely has increased my sense of responsibility and commitment to work with little or no supervision. It has also helped me discover tools that have made my job easier. Overall, remote work can be a great advantage to self-development and can help you harness your intrapreneurial mindset.

I wouldn’t say I prefer remote work to office work, or vice versa. However, I think a fine blend of both is good for employees and management. Post-COVID work era has offered HR professionals these options to choose and maximise their workforce at little or no extra cost.

So which would you prefer — remote work, physical or hybrid?

Kindly share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Categories
Managing Leaders

5 Reasons You Must Up-skill

Up-skilling, the process of harnessing additional training to build and enhance one’s proficiencies, can be achieved by a number of means including taking a course, understudying a mentor, and self-directing one’s learning.

Skills, they say, are the new currency. Where your qualifications might not take you, your unique abilities and talents might. It is therefore imperative to take advantage of every opportunity to expand your skillset, whether as a new joiner, one looking to switch careers or roles, or just generally desirous of professional advancement.

If you have never given serious consideration to up-skilling, these five points might be the inspiration you need:

  1. You’ll be relevant: With the global workforce being unpredictable, up-skilling is one way of staying ahead of the curve, ensuring your skillset (and even you yourself) does not get obsolete. Several years ago when everyone was fixated on medicine, banking and engineering, who would have thought that social media influencing and digital marketing would be regarded as professions today?
  2. It’s a way to become more valuable: It is never enough to desire becoming an asset to your organisation; you must be ready to pay the price, growing through the ranks. Of course, the price comes with some benefits including gaining greater visibility and earning more in terms of remuneration. By up-skilling, you’d be more productive, truly considered as a problem solver and positioned to take on more elaborate responsibilities.
  3. You’ll better harness growth paths and opportunities: Up-skilling shoots you out of your current league and makes you benefit from some “extra” — whatever “extra” means in the your field or for your career. It becomes easier to gain a better standing in relevant fields and helps you expand your network. Simply put: it will change your life!
  4. It is journey of self-discovery: As you can already tell from earlier points, up-skilling is a way of ensuring your life never remains the same again — for good. As an opportunity to unlock your potentials, you’ll expand your horizon to things you thought you could never do, never knew existed or thought would not interest you. Imagine what that would do to your confidence level — it would send it miles up! And you will experience holistic growth!
  5. A chance to meet a need: With the world of work ever evolving, up-skilling gives you the opportunity to meet market needs, especially in the knowledge economy. While acquiring a new proficiency, it is crucial that you contextualise it within the reality of problem-solving. Not only is up-skilling necessary, it positions you as a knowledgeable and versatile employee.

Extra: If you do not up-skill, your level of expertise today would likely remain insufficient to sustain you in the future of work.

A Reminder: Until recently, there were no professions like content creation, product management, social media analysis and data engineering. Times have evolved and it’s only necessary that you do too in order not to be left behind.

You can explore these helpful resources below to start:

PS: While most offer free courses, some come at a token.

Categories
Managing Teams

7 Tips for Effective Team Meetings

Have you ever led or been in a team meeting that went off track? Or does it stretches too long and boring that you slowly lost interest? Of course, we know that feeling!

Team meetings are a great way to engage colleagues, share ideas, and encourage creativity but this won’t happen if your meetings are badly structured or colleagues perceive them to be unnecessary and ineffective.

We’ve got the following tips to guide you and make your meetings rewarding:

1.      Plan Ahead – Keep your meeting on track

To avoid one-sided communication, you should share a brief or meeting agenda in advance with your team. Also, take note of important talk points, expected outcomes, and participants to attend, and choose the right time that suits every team member. This will help you evaluate the success of the meeting at the end.

2.     Adopt relevant technology

Technology is ever-evolving. You can now enjoy great collaboration tools that will help increase the efficiency of your meetings – send messages, share files, set up online calls and more. Here at SystemSpecs, we use collaboration tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google suites, GitHub, and more. You should try it out too.

3.     Be Time-conscious

When team members are late to meetings, it could result in unnecessary delays. There would be a need to recap and extend meetings to cover the agenda which will interfere with the meeting structure and possibly cause a ruckus. To avoid this, you need to set early attendance rules with reminders ahead of time to keep each member in check. Also, allocate time frames to the agenda outline for better time management.

4.     Ask Questions

Be intentional about your team’s participation. The meeting has to be valuable to everyone, so questions should be asked to encourage discussions and input. This way you’ll keep your team members actively interested and involved in the meeting and also confirm they understand the purpose and outcome of the meeting.

 5.     Set Ground Rules

This might seem too serious but it’s incredibly important to set ground rules that would keep your team members in check to avoid interference that could cause delay or generally any problems. Rules like: camera switched off if it isn’t a video call, mic muted when not speaking, phones silenced, meeting expectations, no interruptions, and others as they apply.

6.     Identify Meeting Patterns and Behaviours

If you’re going to change your old meeting patterns, you’ll need to observe your meeting patterns to observe what you think is wrong and also ask your team questions on what should be better improved to make the next meetings more effective. This will give you a better perspective on how the team feels and why they feel that way about your meetings.

7.      Improve Each Week and Do a Follow-up

This is a brief check-up that will boost your meetings every time. Less than being told what to do, people love to feel valued and that you care about their wellbeing. It’s not just about checking task completion but also building relationships with your team and checking in on how they are faring, and also how they are coping with their assigned task.

You can ask questions like: What worked and what didn’t? Was the last agenda accurate and helpful? Was there any information we could have shared in another way?

NOTE: Always test whether you need a meeting before setting up one. Once you have established that, you can decide how to use these tips to hold your best meetings ever. 

Want to make your work-life easy? HumanManager can help your business manage high-performing staff. Click here to get started.

Categories
Managing Processes

7 Key Reasons You Should Outsource Your Payroll

Payroll processing can be time-consuming, complex and repetitive, yet essential. This process includes prompt payment of employees’ salary, calculation of paid and unpaid leave, employee benefits, bonuses, tax deductions and remittances and much more.

While some businesses chose to manage their payroll operations in-house through manual book-keeping or do-it-yourself payroll solutions, others prefer to trust the expertise of a professional HR and payroll firm to manage on a regular basis at pre-determined or agreed rates.

Whichever method you choose to adopt has its merits, but the latter outweighs the former. Read on to find out why you should outsource your Payroll:

1. It Saves Time & Money

From managing staff salary and other benefits, to maintaining payroll departments and/or software solutions, the time and financial cost to any company can be significant over time. Outsourcing payroll to a reputable provider gives you more time and resources to focus on other critical business priorities, such as increasing revenue or retaining existing customers.

2. Helps to Avoid Statutory Penalty

The need to compute taxes correctly, document, and remit same to the Board of Internal Revenue and other statutory agencies of government within the time stipulated can be a major hurdle for businesses of any size. Regulatory compliance is a key outcome of engaging a reputable payroll provider.

When payroll is outsourced correctly, employee taxes and associated schedules are streamlined and made available on time and in the proper formats or order. Also, having an expert on hand helps keep track and stay up-to-date on regulations.

3. Heightens Data Security & Privacy

How safe and secure is your payroll data? Where and how is it stored? Who has access to it and what level of access do they have? What processes are in place to mitigate staff data breaches, particularly for sensitive payroll information? Trying to answer these questions can really break a sweat as data breaches, identity theft and fraud expose the organisation to untold heartaches.

Outsourcing your payroll to a trusted and experienced provider will help de-risk and allow in-house teams focus on monitoring or controlling the process while passing the burden of data security/confidentiality to your preferred provider.

4. Helps Businesses to be Globally Competitive

A manually-driven workforce is like driving a car with square wheels, indeed a very daunting task.

Having a functional Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) to manage both HR and Payroll operations can greatly improve organisation of any size, as it helps structure and scale operations in a seamless way. Automated outsourced payroll service also comes with a modern, easy to use HRIS platform, Employee Self Service (ESS) capabilities, and mobile friendly technology at subsidised or reduced cost.

5. Increases Employee Satisfaction

Prompt salary and benefit payment remains a proven way to keep your employees motivated. A certified outsourcing firm ensures that salary payment is done on time, and the correct deductions and bonuses calculated. It also offers a holistic process that eliminates human error to the barest minimum making reporting and comparisons easier.

6. Allows for 24/7 Access to Payroll Experts

Payroll experts are conversant with evolving regulations and structured to manage complex as well as mundane payroll processes. While some large enterprises often have dedicated teams or departments handling their payroll process and compliance related documentations or timelines, many small businesses don’t have such luxury.

It is important you engage a qualified team of experts with a track record of delivering quality payroll results in a functionally compliant way.

7. Provides Accurate Payroll Reports for in-house Decision Making

Depending on the size and structure of the business, payroll reporting must be securely maintained to aid evaluation of previous reports for hiring and staffing projections, financial auditing in a fiscal year and tax and reporting purposes.

You enjoy access to accurate, timely and comprehensive report when you outsource your payroll to a reliable firm. They ensure that your payroll data is organised and easily accessible for future reporting.

If you can relate to any of the above benefits, it will be a good time to consider outsourcing your payroll or some other processes to your preferred provider.

We have the expertise needed to help you save cost while enabling your team focus on core functions and operations geared towards achieving organisational goals. Learn more at here,  or contact us at [email protected] to get started.

Categories
Managing Processes

Errors To Avoid During Performance Appraisal

Performance appraisals have proven to be one of the best ways to improve employees’ productivity and enhance outcomes. This periodic evaluation of staff performance provides feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, enhances subsequent output, helps identify and reward high-performing members of staff, and determines appropriate salary upgrades.

Despite its numerous benefits, a lot of mistakes — sometimes known as rater errors — from a supervisor’s biased viewpoint can result in low morale, anxiety, poor job satisfaction, or even loss of job. It is therefore pertinent that supervisors, managers, and human resources personnel understand these biases and how to eliminate them during appraisal exercises.

These few points present some of the pitfalls that must be avoided and how to overcome them:

1. Central Tendency/Favoritism/Grouping

Challenge: The appraiser rates staff in a not-too-good or not-too-bad category. This is unfair to employees who really deserve a higher grading.

Solution: Establish and agree on SMARTKey Performance Index (KPI) at the beginning of the appraisal period and evaluate performance against these goals. Also, document observable behaviour over the entire performance cycle.

2. The Halo/Horns Effect

Challenge: Occurs when the appraiserallows specific positive or negative factors related to the employee’s work affect the overall assessment of performance.

Solution: Track and document performance based on agreed KPIs daily, weekly, monthly, bi-annually, or annually. Identify specific behavioural attributes that support your ratings and be sure that none is influenced because it is particularly admirable or irritating.

3. Bias/Comparison/Holding a Grudge

Challenge: This is when the appraiser makes an employee suffer for past behaviour, irrespective of the positive output at work or when the appraiser judges the employee based on factors like state of origin, gender, religion, age, disability, weight, height, marital status, etc.

Solution: Focus on the employee’s work, not on personal matters, unless those personal matters affect the work of the employee. Check your perceptions for accuracy, fairness, balance, and consistency.

4. Recency

Challenge: This occurs when an appraiser rates only recent performance, good or bad.

Solution: Keep track of performance and document observable behaviour over the entire performance cycle to get a balanced view. Ask others for their observations of the employee to see if they have different views.

5. The Sunflower Effect

Challenge: This is when an appraiser rates employees high regardless of performance, to make themselves look good or to be able to give more compensation.

Solution: Employees can justify ratings through tracked comments across set approval workflows for various levels.

6. First Impression Error

Challenge: This is the rater’s tendency to let their first impression of an employee’s performance carry too much weight in the evaluation of performance over an entire rating period.

Solution: Appraisals should support regular feedback, reports and trend analysis to help line managers and HR track employee’s rating over a period.

7. Concluding appraisals without feedback for improvement

Challenge: Employees do not get comprehensive feedback after the appraisal exercise.

Solution: Use an automated appraisal system that allows for feedback. Always provide unbiased feedback about employees’ strengths and weaknesses, and even suggest helpful measures to boost outcomes.

Appraisal errors can cause your entire performance review programme to lose credibility among your employees. Consistent analysis of the process can help avoid this situation!

With HumanManager, you can enjoy a seamless and efficient performance management process that suits interactions within your organisation among employees at all levels, as well as in the physical and virtual workspace. HumanManager makes it a lot easier to achieve your organisational goals.

Ready for a topnotch appraisal? Get started at www.humanmanager.net.

Categories
Managing Processes

7 Must-have HR Modules for your Organisation

Human Resource Management (HRM) processes have evolved over the years, with the growing interest in the need to give employees the best opportunities for optimal performance, and to inherently boost revenue.

These inter-related, complex and often difficult tasks could be overwhelming for HR managers, leaving little or no room for strategic planning and proper fusing of their execution into the firm’s operations.

It is therefore important to consider an intuitive and innovative solution that delivers data accuracy, efficient management and enables the aggregation of multi-sourced data for quality decision-making.

When choosing an HR solution, it must have these 7 modules in order to enhance your operational productivity:

  1. Employee Information Management

The beginning of proper HR management is having the right staff data for a comprehensive insight into the type and capacity of the workforce. A good solution simplifies this process and eliminates hours of searching through hardcopy files for relevant staff information whenever required.

2. Administration Module

This helps you manage organisational structure and data through predefined metrics which enable seamless exchanges, approvals and decision-making. There should be clearly defined access rights for users and automated workflows for various processes to eliminate the need for time-consuming manual approval processes.

3. Performance Management

A fit-for-purpose appraisal system is key to evaluating individual and collective contributions towards set organisational objectives. This module simplifies the management of various appraisal systems including the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) or the Balanced Scorecard systems for an appraisal cycle.

4. Leave Management

According to a popular proverb, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. You can now ensure that your employees take the needed rests as and when due, using a leave management solution to specify applicable leave types, staff entitlements, applicable allowances and schedule vacation times among others while ensuring a smooth handover.

5. Expense Management

Certain jobs demand staff to spend on behalf of companies, and on time too. This process can however be taxing due to the required audits and approval requirements. Automating the entire flow from advances to retirements or even re-imbursements and all the settings to align with company policies is the sure way to go!

6. Payroll Management

Another major source of expenditure of organisations is the compensation system, which largely involves the payroll. You can achieve more productive time for other HR functions and avoid falling on the wrong side of the law when you automate this complex process with the right application.

7. Self-Service

The self-service module empowers employees to comprehensively manage their personal information as well as drive transaction flows, approvals and feedback to monitor progress with relevant processes. Strict access rights should be applied as expected of a standard business support application.

In addition, when all activities have been carried out on the system — transactions passed, approvals given and major processes completed, reporting is the output that makes the work worthwhile for decision-making. Also, a comprehensive solution should have an up-to-date reporting system with easy-to-use infographics for high-level information from the solution.

You need not worry about where and how you can get all these benefits in one solution.

HumanManager, known for its 28 years of optimising workforce and talent management processes, can give you all these benefits and more.

Visit www.humanmanager.net now to request a DEMO and get started!

Categories
Managing Processes

6 Proven Tips for Expense Management in your Organisation

Manual expense management is often a complex process in business, with loads of paperwork and spreadsheets that only result in lots of data entry, large investment of time, and careful maintenance of records — with no guarantee that the process will be error-free, no matter how meticulous it gets.

In order to stem these challenges, some organisations have come up with expense policies to streamline types of expenditure, their rates and/or even limits to which they can be incurred. They also have a process of getting funds in advance or reimbursed. But monitoring and enforcements of such policies remains a challenge.

A little purchase here and a staff travel and logistics cost there can quickly pile up your running cost. If you do not manage your spending and keep it at the barest minimum, it could result in a sizeable bill that you are not prepared for.

This is why as a manager, an admin or HR professional in any organisation, these proven tips will help to improve your expense management. Take a dive!

1. Do a Comprehensive Analysis

Carry out a thorough review of your organisation’s expense policy to define what types of expense will be reimbursed, how expenses should be submitted and how they will be reimbursed. Also, make sure to clearly inform and educate your employees to ensure that they act accordingly. But if you do not have an expense policy, create one today!

2. Have a Budget

Budgets help to set expense and revenue goals. When you know how much you can spend, you can more easily manage your spending. If your revenue is lower than budgeted, find ways to cut expenses and increase income. You can also establish metrics that are meaningful to your business and at par with standard companies in your industry.

3. Get Tough on Fixed Costs

Don’t be complacent about fixed costs because they are generally recurrent and often reflect long-standing relationships with suppliers. You should periodically review market costs to see if you can get better deals from competing suppliers.

4. Reimburse your Employees Promptly

Delayed reimbursements is a common problem. Ensure your staff turn in their requests in time and you act on it within the agreed time. This cultivates employee commitment and satisfaction. Also, let your employee know why an expense is not approved.

5. Cultivate Financial Discipline as a core Company Value

Financial literacy should be extended to your staff through decision-making and team-building, so they are better able to control their own costs. Also, you should actively involve your employees in the cost management process, and seek cost effective ways of operation.

6. Implement an Expense Management Solution

Having a software to ensure an automated reimbursement process gives you and other members of staff ample time to focus on other tasks, and remain motivated to perform better. Such solution will facilitate the submission or reporting of expenses by employees from any location for review and approval by managers from anywhere and at any time.

HumanManager can help your organisation manage its expenses, approval workflow, and required controls, as well as provide adequate reports and generate accounting journals based on your requirement.

HumanManager offers your employees the flexibility and ease to submit their receipts and get their managers’ approvals in real time. It is tested and trusted by hundreds of organisations to effectively manage their Claims and other HR needs including employee information, payroll, performance and leave.

Remember, that lovely quote by Benjamin Franklin: “a penny saved is a penny earned.”

Visit www.humanmanager.net today to get started.

Categories
Innovation

4 Things Every Employee Must Know About Nigeria’s Finance Act 2020

On January 1 2020, the Finance Act 2020, a collection of amended tax and fiscal laws, took effect and further regulates individuals, private and public firms, as well as state and national institutions.

The Act made substantial amendments to the Companies Income Tax Act (CITA), Value Added Tax Act (VAT Act), Petroleum Profits Tax Act (PPTA), Personal Income Tax Act (PITA), Capital Gains Tax Act (CGTA), Customs and Excise Tariff (Consolidation) Act (CET Act), and the Stamp Duties Act (Stamp Duties Act).

It also clarifies previous grey areas such as possible non-taxation, double taxation and introduced an income exemption category.

This said, employees, human resources (HR) practitioners and employers should note below the implications of this law for their organisations and specifically financing:

1. All minimum wage earners will no longer pay tax!

Good news, right?

The law has exempted any employee who earns N30,000 or below from paying personal income tax. This is a huge relief to the lowest earners in the country. Meanwhile, all other income earners will be subjected to the full Personal Income Tax Act (PITA) tax provisions and .

NOTE: See Paragraph 33 of the PITA.

2. You will now pay more tax

This is how:

Prior to the enactment of the Finance Act 2020, 20% of your Gross Income, National Housing Fund (NHF) and your pension contribution are deducted before it (your gross income) is taxed.

In simple terms: Gross Income — (20% + NHF + Pension Contribution) = Taxable Income

For instance, if:

Gross Income N100,000

NHF N5000

Pension Contribution N5000

Your taxable income will be:

N100,000 — (20% + N5000 + N5000)

= N100,000 — (N30,000)

Taxable Income = N70,000

What has changed?

In the new law, tax exempt items (your pension contribution, NHF) will first be deducted from gross salary or income before computing your 20% (relief allowance).

Using same figures, taxable income will be:

N100,000 — (N5000 + N5000)

= N100,000 — (N10,000)

20% Relief Allowance = N90,000 x 20%

= N18,000

Tax Exempt Income = N18,000 + N10,000

= N28,000

Taxable income = N100,000 — N28,000

= N72,000

This shows that your tax exempt is lower and taxable income, higher. The reduction would then result in higher tax and lower disposable income. Employers need to update their payroll templates or applications to ensure compliance.

NOTE: Read Section 33 subsection 2 of the Finance Act 2020.

3. It affects your Post-employment Savings/Insurance or Investment Plan

Life assurance or annuity plans from the immediate previous year are now allowed as retrospective deductions from your taxable pay.

This means that tax relief on life assurance only applies for the previous year. Also, note that the contribution must be recognised by the Pension Reform Act 2014, in line with provisions in Finance Acts 2019 and 2020, Section 20 (1g) of PITA. We can then say that having a life insurance plan is a legal way to reduce your tax.

NOTE: See more in the re-introduced section 33 subsection 3.

4. Your Compensation after Losing or Leaving your Job is also Affected

Now, you don’t have to worry about the tax man.

According to the new law, if you lose your job or you leave your job, and your compensation is exactly N10million or below, no tax!

But if you are paid more than N10million, you will be taxed on the excess only. The law goes further to state that taxes would be payable by the 10th day of the next month and would require reporting during annual tax filing.

NOTE: This is an amendment to section 36 subsection 2 of the Capital Gains Tax Act (CGTA).

These are some summary information on the new Financial Act 2020 and how it might affect you. As an employee, you can ask your HR to explain further and as an employer, speak to your tax consultants to explain the implications to your staff.

HumanManager, a product of SystemSpecs, will ensure you are compliant with all relevant laws of Nigeria. This online solution will also automate your payroll and ensure efficiency in your HR processes as attested to by hundreds of organisations across many industries through the years.

Get compliance-ready for the taxman, start HERE to request a demo or send a mail to [email protected].