Haruna Adams
In the past decade, the knowledge-driven economy has greatly evolved. At the heart of this economy is software development, an area holding great potential for struggling economies such as Nigeria to take a giant leap and compete favourably with more advanced countries.
Even though the growth of software development in the country has long been stalled by huge dependence on foreign-sourced solutions, Nigeria is emerging with software solutions that are outperforming imported and highly specialised ones.
President, Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPN), Dr. Yele Okeremi, recently said: “If we wanted to be competitive, globally, we should have been looking more into the software space.”
There is need to develop IT practices and give local manufacturers of IT software an edge over their foreign counterparts in terms of patronage. Failure to do this will continue to lead to gross capital flight instead of growth opportunities for Nigerians.
In the payroll space, there are numerous solutions in Nigeria but very few are indigenously-owned. This is as the global HR payroll software market continues to increase in value.
In 2017, it was estimated at $4.8 billion and it is expected to reach $8 billion by the end of 2023. While the country cannot completely shut its doors against foreign software yet, the best move would be to embrace more indigenously-built solutions that serve the same purposes.
This will no doubt yield economic benefits and reduce the cost associated with capital flight in that area. Also, since every country has its own nuances in areas such as tax, employment and pensions legislation, a lot of foreign solutions often fail to accommodate local dynamics.
One of the most successful home-made payroll and human resource solutions is Remita Payroll, an improved version of what is known industry-wide as Human Manager.
Remita Payroll was developed by SystemSpecs, one of Nigeria’s foremost HR software and fintech companies. And in Nigeria, Remita takes number one spot, having been a market leader for over 20 years. This solution has revolutionised the payroll and HR processes of several organisations and has been exported to other countries in Africa.
It is a powerful and comprehensive payroll and human resource management solution suitable for any organisation with two to 200,000 employees. It helps organisations to maintain a comprehensive, online employee personal and payroll data; compute all staff allowances, loans, pensions, taxes, overtime allowances, cooperatives, union and other deductions; pay salaries without the need to upload salary schedules from a separate software to the e-payment platform; automatically send electronic payment notification, pay slips and tax analysis slips to each staff at the end of every pay run.
With Remita Payroll, there is availability of extensive, online, standard and user-defined payroll reports, which include nominal roll, staff list, payroll register, variance and audit reports. Users can pay salaries directly into staff accounts held in any commercial banks, micro-finance banks, mortgage bank or digital wallets.
They can also automatically send payments, with electronic matching schedules, to cooperatives, pension fund administrators and tax bodies. Optional modules such as employee self-service, leave management, and claims/expense management, are all integrated on a single platform. The payroll/HR solution, unlike many others, helps in conducting performance appraisal and in processing staff claims and advances.
One of the major advantages of Remita Payroll is its ability to completely eliminate the need for organisations to process payroll on one system and then take the processed data to another platform to transfer salaries or send salary schedules to various banks or statutory agencies. The solution has helped organisations to significantly improve operational efficiency and effectiveness in employee management.
TAMS is another workplace solution of choice for a growing number of SMEs and large organisations in Nigeria because it helps in facilitating HR information management through enhanced data quality and access to information on any smart device anywhere in the world. TAMS is the brainchild of SB Telecoms and Devices Limited, a trailblazer in Nigeria’s biometrics and human resource management solutions market.
Also challenging the system is TalentBase, another Nigerian-owned payroll solution. TalentBase is a cloud-based human resources management software for employee data management and HR processes. Its platform enables users to maintain personnel records for their employees, create employee roles, and view the company organogram; track development of their staff with custom KPIs and performance reports; track vacation entitlement and schedules for their entire workforce; set-up biometric devices and plan workshifts, as well as receive weekly or monthly attendance reports; issue and manage employee queries and response; and access and review historical records for each employee.
Because of the thriving small and medium enterprises space in Nigeria, a lot of other tailored solutions also exist from these providers. Others include PrimePayroll and PayDayNG.
As Nigeria keeps pace with the rest of the world in software development, there must be more efforts to support homemade cutting-edge technologies, expand their markets and translate inventions into economic development. It is only by adopting our niche software packages that we can truly advance.
•Adams is an accountant based in Abuja