Speaking of payroll, (was Re: Tangling "AS/400 Education" etc)

["Rick Baird" <rbbaird@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

James,

Just out of curiosity, I have a few questions about your payroll ap.

James W. Kilgore wrote:
 
> My company
> licenses more copies of Payroll than any other single application.  This left 
>me
> wondering, did the outsourcing proponents have experiences with a Payroll
> application designed by people ignorant of labor laws, union contracts, the 
>whims
> of governmental agencies?  Did they design in a modular fashion?  Was the 
>ability
> to adapt the software one of their design criteria?  From my viewpoint, 
>Payroll
> is one of the easiest applications to design because the decisions are out of 
>the
> hands of the user.  There are a whole lot less "it depends" kind of answers 
>then
> in designing let's say a credit/collections application.

The reason I ask is that in another life (it seems that long ago
anyway) I wrote a payroll system for a company that employed crews of
hourly nomads of heavy equipment operators that could, in any one
week, work in as many as 5 different states, for 6 different unions,
all with their own sets of dues (with different caps and different
rules), doing different work at different pay rates.

Can your package handle this type of environment?  Including state and
local taxes, with checks for reciprocity agreements between states,
etc?

I designed it to be as flexible and modular as I could, but as it
turned out, It became a file maintenance nightmare (I know, not my
problem), and it seemed that at least once a month, they came across
an oddball circumstance that the system couldn't handle.

This is not to mention what happened when it came time to report this
mess to the unions and the IRS, explaining what and why was deducted.  

It was easily the most complicated system I've ever (before or since)
designed, and one of the hardest to keep together.  I've since heard
that the company has been bought, and the are going to convert to
peoplesoft running on some flavor of unix.
My guess is that they'll find it even harder to do.

Rick
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