subject: Is Payment Of Staff Covered By Your Disaster Recovery Plan? [print this page] Floods and fire are regularly in the news and can create a drastic disruption to the ability of a business to be able to continue to trade. In recent times floods in places like Sheffield and the explosion at Buncefield have caused extreme difficulties for businesses. In such extreme circumstances disaster recovery planning is essential.
Failure to make payments to staff on time is almost certain to cause personal financial hardship and risks losing their loyalty and trust. Therefore, planning for continuity of payroll processing and payments should be an essential part of a disaster recovery plan for a business. Even non-paymemt matters like giving employees their payslips on or before pay day needs to be considered so that a business does not fall foul of statutory obligations.
Businesses should already be thinking about moving away from cheque payments if that is what they are using and at least for a reliable backup plan they should look at an electronic payment method.
As widespread as the use of the internet is for businesses and as reliable as it usually is the backup plan needs to provide for alternatives should the internet not be available in the event of a disaster.
A complete payroll services disaster recovery plan will provide a range of options for making payments to staff including online, in-house and via a third party. BACS payments can be an important part of the arrangements and if provided by a third party provider consideration should be given to that third party's arrangements in the event of a disaster that impacts on them.
Whatever the elements of the plan that are chosen then a regular testing and review process is vital. Test payrolls need to be run from alternative site arrangements or via third party BACS if they are the chosen solution. Testing will give a business peace of mind that the backup arrangements will ensure staff payments can be made in the event of a disaster.
