Saving time and money on payroll and compliance

Payroll and compliance are two of the most essential but time-consuming operational elements faced by brokers. 

Scarlett Network’s broker management software’s streamlined, automated payroll and compliance features give brokerages the ability to reduce payroll processing times and associated labour costs significantly.

“Scarlett’s payroll and compliance users have a major advantage over other brokerages still using manual processes and disconnected tools to run and process commissions and payroll,” says Axiom Innovations’ president and CEO, Joe Fakhri. “Apart from enabling brokerages to process payroll and compliance tasks quickly and efficiently, the added benefit and advantage Scarlett’s system provides is centralized and mineable data, which is a key feature for principal owners and brokers who want to delve into brokerage, agent, and lender performance,” he tells CMP.

“Brokerages are able to mine their data with granularity. With a click of a button, principal brokers and administrators can determine their top and most efficient agents and top lenders, to name a few. The wealth of information and centralization of such information allow brokerages and their management teams to make proper and sound business decisions while continuing to increase business efficiency and saving time.”

That time-saving element is essential for principal brokers, according to Axiom business development manager Andrew Schultz, as it allows them to focus on what they’re good at: selling, and expanding their book of business.

“The time savings a brokerage gets from not having to spend a full day processing payroll frees up that extra day to do revenue-generating activities,” he says. “While brokers are business-people and business operators, at the end of the day they’re also entrepreneurs and salespeople to the core. Feeding the pipeline, building their team while closing deals is the primary goal – not managing payroll.

“Scarlett is not just for the big franchises and can be customized to fit big or small brokerages,” he  adds, “freeing up an administrator’s time to do something more productive or allowing a principal broker to sell.”

The platform’s integration with each of the leading origination platforms in Canada means a brokerage’s staff are all interconnected through the same solution, even if they have preferences for different platforms.

“At the end of the day, as a successful business operator, you need to understand your business from a reporting perspective, even if it’s coming from all of the different origination platforms currently available in our industry,” Schultz says.

“Scarlett’s integration with those leading origination platforms across Canada allows principal brokers to access key performance reports, while also quickly and conveniently generating error reporting and annual information reports on the compliance side, which are submitted to regulatory bodies each year.”

Compliance varies by province; what is compliant in Ontario can be different in British Columbia and other provinces. Scarlett was built with the thought that brokerages can scale from one office in one region to multiple offices across the country, with individual users able to customize their compliance criteria specifically for the province where the deal originated.

Payroll also allows brokerages to configure how their agents get paid. After all, Fakhri says, “Scarlett is not just a commission processing system – it’s also a payroll source deduction system that enables brokerages to pay their full-time staff members as frequently as their business requires.” This flexibility allows brokerages to pay based on splits, flat fees, or tier-based models, supporting almost every payout model used in the industry.

“Each of those features makes Scarlett an industry-leading platform for brokerages,” Fakhri says. “It allows them to take the financial pulse of their business clearly and effectively while saving costly administrative time and money. That goes directly back to the company’s motto: ‘Don’t let your business run you. Run your business!’”