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As you’re leaving school, finishing university and getting your first job, retirement is most likely the last thing on your mind. But taking a few steps to set yourself up in your 20s can go a long way to avoiding financial stress in later life. It’s never too early to start preparing for your future.

Set some goals

It’s much easier to get what you want, if you’re clear about what exactly it is you want. We all want to have feel fulfilled, but what does this mean to you and how are you going to achieve it. Of course these goals may change but the planning will be the same.

Consider setting yourself some short, medium and long term goals.

Short term goals might be taking a holiday or buying a car. These are the things you should be putting money towards now, on a regular basis.

Medium term goals can set you up for the next stage in life. Will you want to buy a house, raise a family? You might not want to put all your money towards these right now but they will require planning and saving.

Long term goals will most likely your retirement. You superannuation fund will go a long way to determining this, so it’s important to ensure your employer is contributing correctly.

Pay down your debt

Putting aside savings for a car is all well and good, but any debts you have may affect your ability to reach your financial goals in the short to medium, or even long term. Don’t forget to include any debt repayments as part of your budget.

Budgeting

Budgeting doesn’t mean living on baked beans while you’re friends are out eating at a nice restaurant. What it does mean is being realistic about exactly how much money you are earning and spending. Creating a budget is the best way to track your expenses and avoid living beyond your means. Try some of these great budgeting apps to help you manage the process.

Automatic savings

Once you have created your budget and know exactly how much you have available, you can start saving for your goals. Setting up an automatic payment to a separate savings account will help keep you on track and stop the temptation to dip into your funds.

Sort your Super

For any job you hold over the age of 18 and earn more than $450 a month, or any job in which you work 30 hours or more per week, your employer pays out superannuation. Unless you specify otherwise, these workplaces pay your super to an account with their chosen super fund. Which means if you have had four different jobs, you could have as many as four different superannuation accounts, and be paying four sets of fees.

Combining these funds into the one superannuation account means you only pay one set of account fees, but also means it’s easier to track how much money you have to set you up for your retirement.

Setting up a small business on your own isn’t an easy task. As a one man band you have to learn how to deal with every business function from marketing to IT. One area of your business where it really pays to outsource is in the finance department and hiring a qualified accountant makes a lot of financial sense for most businesses.

Once your business starts to grow though and you begin taking on employees, the temptation is to move more and more of the businesses functions in-house. Whilst this can make sense in some areas, with payroll it really does pay to outsource.

In this article I want to look at four areas where outsourcing the payroll function can save your business a lot of money and time and prevent difficulties further down the road as you expand your workforce.

Resource Savings

Time is money in business and payroll can be very time consuming. As your business expands so too will the time needed to perform the payroll function in-house. Investing in payroll software can also be expensive and keeping it up to date is another drag on your time and resources. Factor into this the training needed to bring staff up to date with the software and any updates and developments and you can begin to see the constant drain on resources that doing your payroll in-house can be.

Staff Recruitment and Absence

One of the clear benefits of outsourcing payroll functionality to an accountancy firm is the stability and consistency it brings to developing expanding businesses. All businesses are vulnerable to the danger of key talent leaving them for sunnier pastures and retaining staff is a core part of HR strategy, especially in the early days. Outsourcing payroll effectively removes the worry of having to recruit and train a new staff member to perform this vital business function on which every employee depends. For smaller businesses, having a single individual in charge of payroll also comes with inherent risks in terms of unplanned absence. Payroll isn’t something that can be put off, so if your payroll administrator is off sick then someone else will need to fill in for them, diverting their precious time away from their core duties.

Compliance

In accounting, accuracy is paramount. The UK’s laws around payroll are strict and any mistakes due to human error can and often do result in fines. Not only is this an unnecessary and unwelcome cost, it also means your payroll administrator has to go back over their work to identify and rectify the error. Accountancy firms deal with payroll every day and have the systems and oversight procedures in place to avoid these kinds of accounting errors. Not only this but HMRC’s rules and regulations are prone to change, meaning re-training your payroll staff. The Real Time Information for PAYE changes introduced in 2013 for example, now means companies have to send a Full Payment Submission to HMRC before every payday as well as a monthly Employer Payment Summary. This can mean 76 online declarations a year. That’s a lot of man hours.

Flexibility and Scalability

Creating a successful business is harder than it’s ever been. Recent research from the Harvard Business Review suggests that the average dying age of a publically listed company is 31 years (down from 55 in 1970). Small businesses have to grow and adapt rapidly if they are to be successful and that means so too do their workforces. Unlike many other business functions, payroll isn’t just desirable but required. The consequences for not paying your staff or getting this wrong can be devastating, with the risk of serious damage to the internal reputation of your company and some fairly irate employees. Outsourcing payroll means you can scale your business quickly without the burden of having to grow your payroll functionality too. Accountancy firms have the staff and the resources to handle your growing payroll needs. For seasonal businesses who take on a lot of additional staff in certain months, this can be a real lifesaver.

In this age of a competitive market, it can be very difficult to establish, develop and sustain any business. When it comes to the management of small business, it can be even more difficult. With strict rules and policies, expensive labor, extensive workload, high competition and financial crunch, it can be very hard for any small business to maintain a number of departments in one organization.

Because of this, many small businesses are now considering outsourcing various key functions including human resource management. Some of the benefits of outsourcing HR responsibilities include:

Cost Savings

It can very difficult to find financing and investing for a small business in the first place. Adding a separate department can only increase the total cost. For small businesses that are especially new, outsourcing HR can be very beneficial. It can be very difficult to run a separate department for various human resources functionalities including recruitment, payroll, training and others. For any small business, budget is one of the strongest concerns.

Efficiency

The HR agencies that regularly deal the human resources functionalities of a number of departments are more experienced and skilled at handling employees. Rather than hiring one candidate for human resources, getting a whole team to work for you is a much better option.

Competitive Advantage

As a new business in the market, you will constantly face challenges and competition from other corporate giants. Small businesses have to constantly maintain the best quality systems to outdo other businesses. You will definitely have a competitive advantage over other business if you outsource your HR function.
It can also help in increasing and enhancing the credibility in a given marketplace. With small businesses, one of the biggest issue and struggle is to keep up with the ever changing laws, regulations, organizational policies, government schemes and insurance claims. It can be very hard for a small of team of only few people to manage those things easily.

However, failure to compliance can lead to financial consequences. The outsourcing giants can not only help you in maintaining the payroll, recruitment and training of employee but also help in managing the workforce on a legal level.

Recruit Better Talent

Traditionally, the HR department of an organization is responsible to discover the best talent for the organization. It can be very difficult and requires sufficient experience to find the highly talented candidates for any job. In most of the cases, it takes a lot of time and hard work to find the right candidate. The HR agencies excel at it because this is their main job.

When you outsource your hiring a professional recruitment agency, they will be able to perform the job in a more quick and efficient manner. They exactly know where they will get the most and highly qualified professional for a particular nature of job.

Conclusion

For any business, it can be very hard to establish a clear set of objectives along with maintaining multiple departments. When it comes to small organizations, things can be even harder. The requirements, duties and responsibilities of managing a number of departments can consume employees and higher management, which will result in reduced focus on the primary goal.

Outsourcing human resources department can help in the reduction of administrative tasks and save a lot of time and energy.