What is the Best Payroll Software for Hospitals?

Hospital workers provide life-saving care to strangers. Their mission-driven, service-oriented careers can be highly stressful, leaving healthcare enterprises to contend with high turnover rates, insufficient staffing, and other challenging work scenarios. From an organizational health point of view, you want to make sure to do everything you can to cultivate company loyalty in your dedicated, highly skilled employees. From a retention standpoint, accurate and timely payroll is an important tool, often considered the baseline for any professional enterprise worth its salt. The best payroll software for healthcare can get you there.

The best payroll software for healthcare will set you free in so many ways. From calculating taxes to remitting them to the proper agencies. From solving the Rubix cube that is tracking benefits accrual. From meeting deadlines to offering health insurance benefits to those who have met their eligibility threshold – no matter what form of eligibility measurement you use. By automating such processes, payroll software can save you more than time and money. The best software will help relieve compliance headaches by helping you prepare your tax documents – including forms required by the Affordable Care Act – at the end of the year, and much more. 

Payroll Software for Hospitals Overview

Gone are the days of searching microfiche to research employee pay issues. (Fun pop quiz for your payroll administrators: What is microfiche?) Today’s advanced technological world demands on-demand, fast access to both historical pay info and current processing tools. Even if your workforce is not spread across more than one county, state, or country, automating payroll can increase accuracy, save valuable time, track benefits accrual, and much more. 

Hospital payroll software has to be functional for a diverse set of employees who may be subject to varying wage and hour payroll laws. Employees could be anyone from your cleaning staff to food preparation workers, to doctors, nurses, and your back office support and business development professionals as well. Each group of healthcare workers and the people who work near them may be offered employment packages classifying them differently (exempt vs non-exempt) with varied benefits too. Regardless of who you employ, using payroll software should simplify operations, automating a significant number of steps in the process of onboarding, offboarding, staying compliant, and everything in between. 

What to Look For in Payroll Software for Hospitals

Your payroll software should quickly be able to implement any rule changes, including changes to tax tables and requirements, as soon as they become mandated by local, state, and Federal laws. For example, employees employed in one state but working in another will be subject to reciprocity agreements allowing them to pay taxes based on the state they reside. Once tax liability is assessed, it must also be remitted to the appropriate agencies within a certain time frame, with tax returns filed in each jurisdiction. Everything from the appropriate collection of FICA (Social Security and Medicare) to FUTA, and sending in payments accurately represents a payroll compliance issue with applicable penalties for organizations.

Benefits can encompass many aspects of a professional's overall employment package. Anything from health insurance, including medical, dental, vision, and short and long-term disability, easily falls into this category, but so does time off. Paid time off, unpaid time off, and eligibility for leave under the Family Medical Leave Act will all need to be tracked, and good payroll software for hospitals can help you accomplish this task. Look for excellent reporting tools and reporting learning support as well.

When it comes to offering employee insurance, great payroll software will be able to alert you to the appropriate times for this process to begin. Look for a tool that allows you to choose between available measurement frameworks, called the “look-back” and “monthly measurement” methods – and find out whether you can require notifications for your payroll team to extend offers of coverage to eligible employees. 

In the same vein, robust payroll software will help populate compliance forms such as the 1095 using any healthcare deductions entered into the payroll system, creating forms for you to audit instead of populating by hand. Since many employees enrolled in employer-sponsored health insurance will need some form of 1095 form, this type of payroll software can save you loads of time researching and adding complicated codes into forms. 

Why use hospital payroll software?

Considered a best practice across many industries, utilizing hospital payroll software can help streamline operations and optimize for accuracy. It can help you avoid penalties for noncompliance with legal standards and help free your payroll team up for other important areas of administration. 

TruPay brings ACA management, payroll, timekeeping, benefits, leave management, and so much more to your company with top-flight payroll software for hospitals. Request a live demo  today to get a virtual tour of our payroll software and consult with our team of experts!