Ways to handle your employee administration

You can set up your employee administration in the following ways.

1. Do employee administration yourself

For example, track your employees' hours in an Excel file and create a digital folder for each employee. In it, you store employment contracts, for example.

Advantage: doing it yourself instead of outsourcing saves costs, and you have direct access to all personnel data. As a result, you can also adjust data quickly. You learn a lot about personnel matters. And this way is less privacy-sensitive than if you outsource it to an employee or another party.

Disadvantage: It takes up your time because you must update the file frequently, and laws and regulations change regularly. You are more likely to make mistakes because you are not familiar with obligations. If you grow your business and change to a specialised employee, company, or software, you have to enter all the data manually. This takes time and it can result in errors. 

 Getting started yourself? This is what you need to arrange: 

• Employment contract
• Any mandatory training
• Other obligations from a collective labour agreement (CAO)
• Take out compulsory employee insurance
• Register sick days
• Conduct and record performance reviews
• Keep a mandatory personnel file

2. Hire a human resources officer

Hire an HR employee or train a current employee in HR tasks.

Advantage: An HR officer specialises in human resources. The HR employee knows the legal obligations and makes sure your business complies with them. Your HR employee also gets to know your business. As a result, an HR employee works more efficiently in the long term.

Disadvantage: If you hire an HR person, you have extra salary costs and employer obligations for a minimum period.  

Are you going to train a current employee to do extra HR tasks? Check the subsidies and schemes available for retraining your staff.

3. Outsource employee administration

Outsource your personnel administration to a payroll company a business specialised in HR. A payroll company mainly handles financial and legal personnel matters. An HR business also handles other personnel matters, such as recruitment and training.

Advantage: An HR company is specialised and, like an HR employee, therefore works faster and makes fewer mistakes than if you were to do it yourself. Unlike your own HR employee, you can have an HR company do a specific assignment. You then only pay for that assignment. For example, you hire an HR company to recruit and train staff for 6 months. In addition, you do not have the employer obligations that you have with your own HR employee.

Disadvantage: Hiring an HR business costs more than doing it yourself. Exactly what it costs depends on the company, the type of assignment, and the size of your own business. You will know if an HR company is cheaper than having your own HR employee if you calculate the salary costs for an HR employee and request a price quotation from an HR company. Besides, you have less control over the privacy protection of your employees. Therefore, check whether the HR company you hire complies with privacy legislation. In addition, draw up a processing agreement.

4. Buy software

Purchase HR software that allows you to manage your HR needs digitally. This can also be in combination with one of the options above. Suppose you run a cleaning company. You pay the wages yourself, and spend a lot of time collecting and entering the timesheets of your employees. A time processing system then offers a solution. 

Advantage: Your employees can often make their own on-and-off requests. Think of registering hours or requesting an employer statement. In addition, you can often link to other digital systems, such as your accounting system. Thanks to a link between your HR system and your accounting system, the latter immediately knows, for example, how much tax you must pay per employee. That saves time and errors. The software also allows you to process larger amounts of administration than an HR employee. Finally, software can also automate the creation of reports. For example, you can see how often your employees are ill on average each year.

Disadvantage: HR software is privacy-sensitive because you often process data online. Therefore, make sure you can work securely online before using the software.

Do you plan to buy software? Here's how to avoid a bad purchase.

Finally, whatever way you choose to keep track of your employee administration, a personnel file is always mandatory. Find out what the retention period of a personnel file is and what the rules are (in Dutch).