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Financial management factors that go in favour include lower need to actively manage IT assets, no need for long term IT asset and financial management, and lower working capital requirement.

These and several other interesting aspects are explored by the author on CFO Innovation. Read more at cfoinnovation.com :

The recent ruling by Madhya Pradesh High Court is a case in point where well established practices about wages for PF contribution are being put to question. One is even likely to wonder as to who is the ultimate beneficiary of all this debate and quandaries that are thrown up.

One school of thought firmly believes that employers are within their rights to structure salary compensation in the best employee-friendly manner as they think fit. After all it is a competitive market and no person is forced to join any organisation if they feel the compensation policies are not fair.

On the other hand other renowned persons may well argue that employers take advantage of such ambiguity and the employee has little option but to accept the company policy in such matters.

It’s certain that this debate is not going to die down anytime soon. Employers are sure to feel a big pinch if this is left uncontested. The EPFO would feel they have identified a big lacuna which needs to be corrected. Either way, the Hon’ble courts will have the final say and the outcome is bound to throw up many a question.

For more opinions and news the following links may be useful:

1. CiteHR: http://www.citehr.com/348562-madras-high-court-ruling-applicability-pf-contb-certain-allowances.html

2. E&Y: http://www.de.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Alert_India_080711/$FILE/Alert_India_080711.pdf

3. KPMG: http://www.us.kpmg.com/microsite/tnf-asiapacific/2011/India-july5no3.pdf

4. News site Firstpost: http://www.firstpost.com/business/take-note-higher-pf-may-eat-into-your-take-home-pay-44695.html

To enable roll out of these upgrades, Emportant would be down for maintenance on 27-Sep-2010 from 06:00 AM IST upto 11:00 AM.

We are taking a longer downtime than usual, that’s because we have a lot of updates being applied in this batch.

More on the list of changes later…

While there are obvious challenges in large organisations due to high headcount, small organisations have different but equally important challenges to manage. To start with many of the small business do not have a HR professional managing the affairs on full time basis ; those who do have one – have to be content with a fresher out of some MBA school.

Nothing wrong with the lady with fresh ideas – but then you need one who can first put day-to-day things in place, particularly when you do not have much time to spare for her and guide her on routine matters.

In this context, how does one ensure that proper policies are in place, they are monitored, data is being maintained properly, attendance and leave is being tracked, confirmation dates are not being missed, new joiners are being given proper induction etc

That’s where a mature HR software comes in handy – with loads of automation, best practices and workflow built-in – which allows most of these activities to run on auto-pilot! This helps when you a HR person as well as when you don’t!

Came across this interesting article by Denis, on a similar subject – I am sure this would be of interest to most of you.

Justifying HR software for the small business

Click here for EBIZQ commentary on multi-tenancy

Leave / Absence tracking in Emportant HRMS provides you not just the current leave balances but also the balances and absence history as on any previous date. What’s more, the unique Leave Calendar provides a calendar view showing number of team members on leave during each day of the month. Our customers have found this indispensable for Leave planning for their team / department / branch offices.

We have worked on your feedback and made it easier. Now you can create first few key users for HR and Payroll from Setup page itself. Just enter the email ID of the users you want to grant access to Emportant for  the HR and Payroll role and click save – they’d get access to the system instantly.

Another improvement is creation of enterprise structure. Now it takes just one click to enable/disable the enterprise stucture components you need to implement. For example, if you do not have branches and divisions, simply un-check them and save – they’d disappear from your setup.

We look forward to your inputs to make it a breeze to setup Emportant.

We are deeply committed to ensure that Emportant customers irrespective of whether they are on a paid edition or on Freedom edition get quality support. While for paid editions we are able to provide better personalised service thru email, phone and sophisticated ticket mechanism – we had to find a viable and vibrant support platform for Freedom customers as well.

This forum will be actively monitored and manged by our support executives to provide timely support to our valued customers.

This is designed to be a community support forum and hence we expect our experienced customers and partners as wel – to be actively participating in issue resolutions and discussions.

We have also created exclusive board for you to share your ideas and suggestions to keep the community growing. After all Emportant exists because you are important.

Check out – Freedom support forum