How payroll and accounting software integration can enhance your business

Are you fed-up of the repetitive and tedious task of uploading all your payroll information into your accounting software?

We get it – not only is it time consuming, but as an employer, it also leaves room for human error – whether it's from duplications of data or inputting the wrong employee details. This leads to more time being lost in identifying and resolving these errors, which in turn can damage your employee morale, as well as the efficiency of your business across the board.

What can be done to resolve this?

Here at BrightPay, we have recently integrated with Surf Accounts, a cloud-based accounting software that helps businesses, whether you’re an employer or an accounting firm, to take charge of your accounts.

Together, BrightPay and Surf Accounts can streamline the entire payroll process for you, eliminating the need to export your payroll information from BrightPay and import it to the accounting software manually. This is all thanks to API, which stands for Application Programming Interface.

What does an API do?

An API simply allows two applications to communicate and work together with one another.

This means that APIs work almost like a middleman, placing information conveniently all in one place, with the ability to send information to other systems.

BrightPay does this with many applications, such as Revenue for example. BrightPay communicates with Revenue to retrieve the latest RPNs to ensure that employees’ correct tax deductions and cut-off points are applied.

This also comes into play when BrightPay automatically creates the Payroll Submission Request (PSR) which is ready to be sent directly to Revenue from within BrightPay’s software, once the payroll is finalised. This allows you to save an incredible amount of time, while also ensuring you don’t forget this important payroll step and reducing the possibility of uploading issues.

We use APIs every day without even realising it. APIs are working behind the scenes to make our lives as convenient as possible. For example, Google and Apple use APIs to display weather data in their systems. They don’t run weather stations, but instead simply allow the data from these weather providers to be displayed within their software, simplifying the process for you.

BrightPay integrates with five different accounting software  to streamline your payroll process even further. Other examples of APIs in our software are our integration with payment platform Modulr, and pension providers.

Watch this quick three-minute video on a brief overview on BrightPay’s seamless API integration with Surf Accounts.

How does this help my business?

Payroll and accounting software have always been separate systems, never communicating with one another. Employee salary details have always needed to be entered manually into both software, which is an extremely time-consuming and repetitive task for employers.

With the BrightPay and Surf Accounts integration, your payroll information is now sent from the payroll software straight into the accounting software, eliminating the need for you to manually upload these details.

BrightPay simply produces a payroll journal which can be viewed and downloaded. You can then send this journal into the general ledger in Surf Accounts, directly through BrightPay.

This ensures your payroll information is accurate and correct, preventing errors across the board and improving the efficiency of your business.

Some of the main benefits include:

• Streamlining your entire payroll process from start to finish
• Allowing you to spend more time attending to more productive business matters
• Submitting data in just a few clicks
• Eliminating costly mistakes, saving you hours of time
• Improving the efficiency of your workflow

How does it work?

Simply click into the journal button on the menu bar within BrightPay’s payroll software, and click into Surf Accounts. After that, you choose a date range and BrightPay will retrieve your nominal accounts from Surf.

Next, all that’s left is to choose your nominal ledger mapping (where you want to post your data within the accounting software, adding any necessary variations). The nominal ledger mapping is saved, so you don’t need to redo do it each pay period. The information you submitted is then found in the journals section within Surf Accounts, ready to be processed.

Please view our short guide on how to use Surf Accounts’ API within BrightPay’s software.

Why should I use BrightPay?

Here at BrightPay, we are constantly developing our software to solve problems for payroll processors, whether you’re an employer, an accountant or a payroll bureau. We are an award-winning software, recently winning top payroll product at AccountingWeb’s Software Excellence Awards in 2021.

Our payroll software includes full functionality for PAYE modernisation and is fully Revenue complaint. We provide free phone and email customer support, with over 330,000 businesses using our software across Ireland and the UK, and a 98.8% customer satisfaction rate.

We also provide a range of online resources, including webinars, guides and video tutorials that are completely free for you to access from anywhere, at any time.

“I find BrightPay to be very user friendly and has all the features required to run payroll efficiently for an SME. The updates and customer support are excellent.

I recommended BrightPay to another SMB that I work for and they switched from another market provider in 2016 with ease and are very satisfied with BrightPay now.”

- Lorraine Walters , Acara Energy Ltd

Where can I find more information?

We recently hosted a live webinar covering a more in-depth analysis on how BrightPay’s integration with Surf Accounts works.

The webinar includes the following:

• The Importance of Automation
• What Payroll Journal Integration is
• How BrightPay’s Integration with Surf Accounts can help you
• The Benefits of Integrated Payroll & Accounting Systems
• Other API Integrations in BrightPay

Watch a recording of the webinar here.

Our cloud extension

Here at BrightPay we also have a cloud extension, BrightPay Connect, that allows both you and your employees to access payslips and HR information through a secure online self-service portal.

BrightPay Connect also backups up payroll data to the cloud every 15 minutes, to a fully secure remote location. This means that there’s always a backup available and ready to download, should a crisis arise.

Other BrightPay Connect features include:

• Annual leave management
• GDPR compliance
• Company calendar
• Interactive employee app
• Document sharing with emeployees
• The ability for employees to update their personal information

If you’re interested in BrightPay Connect, sign up for a free 15-minute demo to see how BrightPay Connect can work for your business.

Related articles:

• Seamless integration at your fingertips
• “It’s just so easy to use” – What customers have to say
• 7 reasons why you should process payroll in-house

Posted byEleanor Mc GuinnessinAccounts SoftwarePRSI