Best friends, really? This may sound ridiculously cheesy for an analogy for rostering and payroll software but bear with us.

Remember your best friend at school? You did everything together. You believed you were two parts of the same whole.  If you didn’t see or speak to each other every day, you felt like you were in the dark, desperate for contact and information.

The same applies to two crucial parts of your workforce management toolkit. If payroll and time and attendance (T&A) should be married, your rostering and payroll systems need to be best friends.

Because clunky APIs don’t make for a close rostering-payroll system relationship.

Nothing in the world can beat face-to-face contact for building and maintaining honest, open relationships. Long-distance is hard, even for best friends: the time taken between calls is long, messages are delayed, and you never really see the full picture of what’s going on in the other person’s life.

The same goes for rostering and payroll software. If they are ‘in the same room’ e.g. built into the same system with direct data feeds, the relationship and therefore integrity of the data will be far more complete than if you try and maintain the relationship long-distance via an API connector or, worse still, manual data transfers. While APIs and data transfers work, they are slow, so you won’t be able to use a real-time dashboard. Furthermore, businesses often find they can’t transfer every field of data that they need for detailed reporting. Data gets lost, gaps occur, and getting accurate visibility of costs becomes impossible.

A system where rostering, T&A and attendance and payroll are purposely built together (like Roubler) means these components are always in the same room.

Because a good rostering and payroll system relationship depends on sharing. Everything.

Being connected isn’t enough if someone (or some system) is holding back information. You know when your best friend isn’t telling you something or sharing something important – and it makes for a very awkward relationship. One person has more information than the other.

The same applies to rostering, timesheets and payroll. Effective management means having an exact picture of hours (scheduled and worked) and accurate labour costs at each stage in the cycle so you can control your budget and optimize your roster according to workloads. This depends on each component having access to the exact same Modern Award templates, the same employee profiles and payroll information. Like best friends, they need to share all the nitty-gritty details including shift patterns, and complex arrangements like higher-duties, break lengths and split-shift agreements.

Furthermore, if rostering and T&A are straight forward and all the necessary information is present, you can even use rules to automatically approve timesheets.

Because having rostering and payroll on the same platform is more cost-effective.

Like splitting the cost of a large pizza and keeping it on the one bill, pooling resources for the cost of something (in this case software) is often the best way.

A purpose-built, integrated workforce management system that includes rostering, T&A and payroll much more cost-effective to implement and run than separate ‘best of breed’ systems bolted together with APIs (another cost!). When they are all together, you only pay one subscription cost, one bill and one implementation fee.

Maintaining separate rostering, payroll and even T&A systems doesn’t make sense. The best business outcomes happen when all components are built into the same platform (the ‘same room’) and have a ‘no holds barred’ information-sharing policy.

Download our free purchasing guide for practical advice on finding the right workforce management system that ensures all the components you need are the best of friends.