ON THE PAYROLL
The importance of robust crew payroll solutions by Neil Carrington, CEO at Voyonic Crewing Limited
It sounds like a simple enough problem to pay the crew each month so why is the solution not easier? Unfortunately life is never quite that simple and in today’s highly regulated world it does not get any easier.
Crew still want to be paid gross and ‘take care’ of their own tax and social security liabilities and there are many solutions to facilitate this.
For a complete solution the process is a little more complicated because moving money around in the modern world is not as straightforward as it used to be with Anti-Money laundering legislation governing all payment transactions somewhere along the line.
Where does the money come from, where is it going and more importantly can you prove it? Even opening a personal bank account today is no longer straightforward and there are hoops to jump through depending who your banker might be.
Fortunately technology is available to take away much of the pain of the payroll process and help to simplify the due diligence processes that need to be followed. This technology also adds more value to the process in terms of how your money might be used to best advantage.
Some crew still don’t trust this technology for varying reasons but anecdotally it is a question of not letting ‘people’ know where you are or have been. This fear is misguided because there is no escaping from the fact that somebody somewhere knows exactly where we are if we are fulfilling a normal job and a normal life.
As a man of a certain age my trust in technology is still developing but there is no escaping the fact that it is here and we need to harness it to best advantage. Any payment process is at its weakest where there is any manual intervention and duplication of effort and this can be as simple as not being able to read somebody’s handwriting properly or transposing digits when typing in an IBAN.
Where there are systems available, then they should be used in order to help automate and simplify processes, an example of a system that aims to help simplify and automate this is Dovepay.
Dovepay is a new generation of payments company, founded to solve the problem of sky high banking charges within the marine payroll industry.
Based in the Channel Islands, their accounts and proprietary technology enables you to make payments in 35+ currencies, reconcile statements and process bulk payments faster and at a fraction of the cost of commercial banks, without needing to change your payment provider.
Dovepay bridges the gap between payments, banking and security, offering next generation features to an industry and demographic that has previously been overlooked.
Find out more at www.dovepay.co.uk
This article was written for the Spring Summer 2020 edition of ONBOARD Magazine and can be found here.
