A clarification ON Salary cycle

 

A clarification Salary cycle

1-      Why Salaries by 10^th?  Not by 1^st?

 

Payroll process is a time-consuming process and have various stakeholders, roughly this is how it works.

1-           Attendance data of all schools need to be collated for the month, and this can be done only when the month is over – this takes around 2 days.

2-           All Salary advances are then verified – this takes around 1 day

3-           Data from 1 & 2 is collected and sent to Directors, who reviews it – 1 day

4-           Director sends his approved sheet to the Payroll team – (who are external to DAS) – they revert – mostly within 2-3 days .

5-           Once Payroll indicating what each person is eligible to get is received – payment is immediately released – 1 day

We Minimum turnaround from end of month to salary release is  is 6-10 days , and if at any step it is delayed ( say attendance data is not reached in time, or payroll team is on leave) , it may get to more than 6 days… we try our level best but then process is well defined and cannot be shortened due to checks and balances. 

So we have to plan for this 10^th to 10^th cycle FOR our expenses and commitments  as standard procedure.

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 2-      How were we doing it before COVID? How could we even pay before month closure?

Before  covid ,a lot of financial procedures were not compliant with standard operating procedures.

External auditors raised concerns on

1-      how salaries were paid without attendance verification

2-       recruitment interviews were missing joining dates , leaving date and others.

3-       how people were paid for a full month when they only were there for 15 days 

Such things cannot continue for long.

Audit compliance is key, wrongs of past needs to be corrected. And we have corrected them so that we are upto date and compliant with standard SOP.

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