Bookkeeping is an activity that involves the recording of monetary transactions of a company. It is an essential activity for any business. The transactions that are recorded are then transferred to the various accounts that are maintained by the business in a method called the double entry book keeping or accounting system.

The company undertakes various transactions with other individuals or corporate entities. These entities can be suppliers, vendors, customers, government or employees. Companies hire employees and pay them a certain amount of money in the form of wages and salaries, at the end of a specific period like a week or a month. At the expiry of such period, the company has to carry out an exercise called generation of payroll, which calculates and prints a payroll slip for each of the employees.

A number of factors and variables have to be taken into account for payroll processing. Factors such as attendance, overtime, leave records, wage rate and salary have to be considered and accounted for when an employee’s payroll is to be generated. Of course, it is possible to do this manually. However, it is a lengthy exercise and is error prone.

 There are software that carries out the payroll processing and generation. This class of software is called Payroll Accounting Software. A number of vendors provide payroll accounting software. As a part of a responsible and efficient procurement process, our first and foremost step is to list out what our specific requirements are. In other words, we should have a very clear idea of what we are looking for,

Having done that, we need to shortlist the vendors’ products with the feature and requirement set that we have already outlined. This is an iterative exercise, and we may have to change or modify our requirements.

Of course, when we are carrying out this exercise of mixing and matching, we have to consider our budget. We should remember that it is more cost-effective to purchase software with a comprehensive set of features, instead of buying a bare boned system that will need to be upgraded in the future.
 
Most software providers and vendors have an online presence. It would be a good idea to download a trial of the software through the vendor’s website.

We should Test-drive the software before we buy it, and make sure that it fulfills all our requirements.