CASE STUDY: Sage Payroll Round Trip

Tools: Sage Payroll, C++, Excel
Industry: Accountancy Wervices
Application: Payroll data entry

Overview

Village Software Engineering has developed a relationship with Sage Solution Centre GMT Computers Ltd. Village develops extensions and bespoke development on top of Sage accountancy packages.

This product is a solution allowing users to update Sage Payroll by email. It was developed for Payroll Bureau's and companies with multiple sites.

Return on Investment

Currently most payroll bureaus operate by receiving updates of hours worked and pay rates by fax, email or mail. These are entered by hand introducing the risk of errors and adding to production costs.

The solution provided allows the end user to update employees records in the familiar technology of Microsoft Excel. The bureau staff no longer have to undertake the retyping but can instead address the more complex pay and personnel issues.

Software licensing and installation costs can be quickly recouped. Benefits:-

• Remove retyping of data:
• Cost saving
• Fewer errors
• Payroll staff can concentrate on more complex issues.
• Empower staff to enter pay data at source.

With solutions available to companies available in software and as online services, payroll bureau's operate in a competitive environment they need to support can gain it efficiently and at reasonable cost compared to other options.

Solution

The launch customer chose to use Excel as the user interface for their customers as it provided a familiar interface and technology.

A user interface was developed in Excel that allowed the end users to adjust employee details and add various payments and deductions to an employee's profile.

At the bureau an interface was developed to export existing data from the Sage Payroll system to the Excel spreadsheet this spreadsheet could then be emailed or otherwise delivered to the end client.

Once updated by the manager or administrator at the end customer the spreadsheet is returned. The software on the server then imports the data updating existing employees and adding new ones.

Technology

Village has previously developed Sage Payroll solutions and was able to call upon an existing code base written in Borland C++. Where necessary this was modified and added to for this solution.

This provides Village with a series of 'Payroll Objects' for Employees, Companies, Payments and Deductions commonly used in payroll interfaces. These objects and their associated testing code are used over a number of products. They must be updated, retested and released annually to adjust to annual changes in Sage software.

A new spreadsheet solution was developed to allow safe entry of data. This solution written in VBA allowed data entry to be tightly controlled and quality assured at the users end. Excel while a powerful tool is relatively hard to constrain to stop users destroying the data structure, Village programmers called upon experience from previous projects to design a suitable solution.

A transaction server was written in Borland C++ Builder to co-ordinate the movement of data back and forth between the spreadsheet and the Payroll Objects.

Cost

Village works on Sage solutions with its partner GMT Computers. Export & Import solutions range in price from L1,000 to L10,000 depending on how much of the solution already exists in the code base.

Code is updated every year along with changes in the Sage Payroll some sort of support cost is therefore inevitable.

Excel based systems also have a price range of L1,000 to L10,000 although it is often appropriate to take an existing spreadsheet solution and redevelop it in another technology.

Sage Solutions

For sage solutions please contact Michelle Harrison at our partners, GMT Computers Ltd:-

In addition to joint projects with Village a range of Sage based solutions are available from GMT.