SapphireOne Payroll 2003 R2The definition of HR is pretty loose and rubbery, but many people will argue that a payroll-only package may be a better fit in the accounts department rather than HR. On the other hand, your employees will no doubt argue that the most important aspect of the company's human resource management is that they get paid on time.
SapphireOne is a payroll package with very little in the way of additional HR bells and whistles. It is very easy to learn and navigate, with a very clean and simple Windows interface.
Although, while SapphireOne does not specifically include other HR functions to some extent they can be "mimicked" using the package's integrated word processor, spreadsheet, and drawing package. For example documents created in the word processor can be searched for keywords, the spreadsheets can be indexed and searched, and the drawing package could be used to create a floor plan of the office with the location of a particular employee marked-all this could then be attached to their personal details.
Accrued benefits can easily be transferred with the employee from a sister company, for example. Any change in an employee's award or hours worked is automatically reflected in their leave accruals and pay and, while salary changes can be backdated, this is not an automatic feature and involves a little manual entry. Creation of group certificates is straightforward and one-off certificates can be produced simply be specifying the relevant records.
While most changes to administrative data are updated in real time, changes such as salary and hours are not reflected until the start of the next pay to avoid errors in current open pay runs.
There is no self service feature in the system, so users will be unable to create their leave requests online. Through the security feature, you can provide limited access by locking off various portions of the system, but this would still not provide enough self-serve functionality to justify the effort.
The employee details are a little more lean than Greentree for example, but Greentree includes full HR and OHS functionality so by default the payroll inherits a more extensive shared database.
The standard reports supplied with SapphireOne at first glance may appear a little limited and include "simple" text reports and "super" graphical reports, although as with most packages of this type the graphical reports are often of less use than the text reports. However, report parameters can be easily modified by the user to create an almost unlimited range of unique reports. Indeed the query features are quite powerful and easy to use.
It would have been nice to have the software automatically notify the HR staff when, for example, an employee's accrued leave exceeded a preset limit, but this option is not available. Naturally a report can be generated manually to display leave accruals but this is just one more task that the staff must remember to carry out on a regular basis.
| Product | SapphireOne Payrool 2003 R2 |
| Price | AU$3300 per concurrent user; includes SapphireOne Financials and SapphireOne Assets |
| Vendor | SapphireOne |
| Phone | 02 8362 4500 |
| Web | www.sapphireone.com |
| Interoperability |
|
| Full integration with SapphireOne Financials and Assets, but only capable of exporting in TXT format to other applications. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| Supports thousands of employees; vendor has clients with more than 10,000 employees running the software. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| A powerful framework, and financial/asset management software included in the price. | |
| Service |  |
| Standard support is e-mail only, phone support is an extra cost. Various maintenance agreements available. | |
| Rating |  |
