Tilos reinvents electronic statements with InfoSlips

Tilos Business Solutions has developed InfoSlips, employee and customer relationship management software that goes beyond the scanned statement or payslip. Due to the application`s design, it lends itself not only to electronic statement delivery, but also that of payslips, allowing additional information to be included, such as targeted advertising and customer and employee education.

"We initially developed InfoSlips in the HR environment, but it quickly outgrew that," says Alan Burger, CTO at Tilos. "With the type of information that we can add to the documents, which are unlimited in space unlike paper statements and payslips, and offer flexible design parameters, our potential customers quickly grew to include retailers, banks and anyone with a large number of statements to issue."

The American Payroll association, in partnership with consulting firm KPMG, recently released a benchmark study of companies that employ 10 000 or more people, which determined key factors that allow them to provide payroll services at lower costs.

They discovered that e-payroll technologies such as self-service systems, paperless payroll operations and automated tax filing can be leveraged to reduce costs in the finance department. The same technologies can be applied in the retail environment to reduce costs associated with printing and delivering statements and answering associated queries.

"We have found that companies that want to address gains in payroll productivity should immediately look at automating basic but ultimately costly procedures, such as payslip inquiries, name and address updates, voluntary deduction requests and package modelling," says Burger.

"Automating the process clearly saves enormous amounts of time and labour."

When a customer or employee receives an InfoSlip and has a query, this is generated electronically by clicking the item, and it is automatically sent to the correct person in the organisation that deals with it. As far as personal information is concerned, employees and customers can correct any errors and submit them back to the server via the Web.

The system is designed so that receivers are offered a quick scan of the most critical information, with the ability to drill down for more detail by simply clicking a button. All this interaction takes place offline, in e-mail and a Web browser, and only once a customer or employee wants to update personal information, for instance, does the software request a Web connection.

In addition, once the software is closed along with the password-protected e-mail, it deletes any temporary files created for viewing information, thereby securing that information from prying eyes.

Since it is easily directly integrated into back-end systems at the server side, it requires no process reengineering and delivers a rapid return on investment.

"The ability to achieve all of this and more, and be deployed within weeks between statement and payroll runs, makes InfoSlips the employee and customer relationship management product that will immediately reduce HR, payroll and statement processing time and costs, help educate customers and employees and increase the accuracy of HR and customer information," says Burger.

The software complies with guidelines stipulated by South African Revenue Service (SARS) in terms of information delivered and securing it en-route, and goes beyond this to secure it on arrival and storage at destination.