Nitin Mittal Senior Manager, Assurance and Risk Advisory at Perfect Accounting .and shared services Pvt. Ltd. Read more…
Recording attendance and leaves is a crucial part of HR processes. Just like any other vertical, education is fiercely adopting smarter technologies to facilitate an environment of optimal growth for each staff and at the same time, eliminate tedious processes. So, in the last decade, a great percentage of schools globally have implemented leave management software and have set benchmarks when it comes to school administration.
The EdTech space is rupturing with technologies promising to transform its administrative processes. The main technology that is widely adopted is the ERP system. Enterprise Resource Planning software is all about automating businesses processes and enabling a smooth symphony between each of these processes. There are multiple modules within the ERP catering to finance, HR processes, sales & marketing, and inventory management. Each business vertical selects ERP according to its business goals. For education, the ERP systems that are adopted mainly focus
on student administration, attendance, admissions, payroll & leave management, examination, and finance. Leave tracking is an important aspect of the ERP as it is directly related to payroll computing.
Many times, an ERP comes with a basic leave management module and in that case, there are vendors who offer cloud-based Absence & Leave Management Software as a service. Now, these cloud-based systems can be easily integrated with enterprise applications.
Many times, a school management system might just require a technology top up in the form of integrating a leave management module from a third party vendor. Currently, the market offers fantastic leave management software toolbox that seamlessly integrates with legacy systems and enterprise applications. The leave management module in a broader sense of the term connects the other functionalities of the ERP. The leave management tool gives critical inputs on the availability of staff during a certain period in time.
This helps in planning different events and programs by educational institutions, payroll computing, and attendance tracking. To be precise, the leave management system enables the administration of the educational institutions to:
Once the institution’s policies have been fed into the system, the leave management tool works in conjunction with the existing ERP system to automate the entire process of leave management. This might reduce resource cost along with the costs associated with generating and maintaining hard copies of leave application forms. Not only cost, but it also saves time too.
The employee leave management software module captures details from online forms and maintains a record for every staff. This enables the administrative personnel with insights on the service quality of the staff and a bird’s eye view of the overall administrative and functional efficiency of the institute as a whole. The leave management toolkit offers business critical insights that can further be employed to make procedural changes and formulate policies for an empowering work environment.
Once the institutional specific leave policies are fed into the system, the system starts sending reminders of upcoming holidays and residual leaves if one opts for one. There is always a provision to categorize leaves and based on the one applied, a notification of the residual leaves immediately reaches the staff. This notification also reaches the finance department and helps them with payroll processing.
One of the greatest benefits of integrating leave tracking module is robust tracking of leaves and maintenance of records. These records can be accessed by the finance team to calculate payroll on a monthly basis. This not only eliminates the tedious and error-prone manual process but also helps the team to sync with companies policies. Furthermore, the technology intervention minimizes chances of error and brings down the possibility of conflicts with accurate data at disposal.
Not every leave management system available in the market is suitable for all ERPs. For any institution or organization to invest in an additional leave tracking software suite in spite of having an existing ERP is a significant cost to the company. Hence, it is important that certain factors are carefully ascertained before investing and these critical factors are:
1. Affordability– The price and feature bouquet always do not add up to the value point. Hence it is important to be judicious with the budget and look for all possible options. Not all features serve the purpose and hence, administrators and decision makers can look into cloud-based software service where the clients get to choose the features they want and pay only for that feature specific service.
2. Customization– Every educational institute has its unique automation requirements. So one bill doesn’t fit all. Hence the level of adaptability acts as defining criteria when it comes to shortlisting. The customization level is decided by the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with other enterprise applications. Most of this customization prowess is derived from the open source foundation. So this is a critical point to consider.
3. Training during integration– Integration with the existing ERP calls for solid tech support so that ongoing functions & processes do not get impacted. Therefore the administration must to considerable market research to identify a leave management software suite that offers training through tutorials, videos, podcasts and active chat rooms for speedy troubleshooting.
4. Post sales support– Even after the successful onboarding, there can be initial teething troubles when it comes to syncing the new technology. The post sales support becomes supercritical then. The only way to identify potential leave management toolkit is through peer and market reviews.