SaaS-based payroll applications and productivity in small businesses

Payroll vs. Productivity: The Role of Information Technologies (IT)

Project Description

Payroll often costs companies tens of thousands of productive hours per year and tens of thousands of dollars to process, not counting the correction of errors and the more complex tasks of managing tax reporting (Tinsley, 37, 38). There are many opportunities for using IT to increase the productivity of payroll processing within organizations. The rapid growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) continues to fuel adoption of payroll processing applications in small and medium business (Roberts, 24, 25). The question fo whether using SaaS-based payroll applications to increase the productivity of small and medium businesses has yet to be empirically validated or refuted however. That is the focus on this proposed research. Small and medium company business owners, their financial experts including the Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and accounting managers all are concentrating on how to get more work done at less cost, and are interesting in SaaS as a means to gain access to accounting applications via the Internet (Roberts, 24, 25). The CFOs are the audience or sampling frame of the research effort, specifically those in small and medium businesses with sales less than $25M per year. SaaS has evolved from being tested on pilot programs to being used in mainstream accounting, finance, sales and service functions and has emerged as the fastest growing platform for IT services globally (Kugel, 45, 46).

Outline of Proposed Paper

The following is the outline of the proposed paper:

I. Executive Summary

II. Accounting Processes and Automation: Gaining Productivity From IT

III. Software-as-a-Service in Accounting: Current Best Practices

IV. Research Methodology

V. Analysis of Results

VI. Conclusion and Recommendation's

VII. Appendices and References

Scope and Methodology

The scope will include interviews with 50 CFOs in the local region from small and medium businesses randomly selected from manufacturing, service and support industries. A total list of all small and medium businesses in the region will be defined and random number generator used to select the companies who will be contacted. Initial contact will be through personalized letters to the CFOs stating the intent of the research and its use in academic research. Follow-on telephone calls will be used to contact them and have the questionnaires completed. The initial letter will have the survey included, in addition to providing a link they can use to complete the survey online. Giving these respondents the opportunity to answer the questionnaire in either way will increase response rates.