The way we were
...the answer was to convert it back to the Safeguard One-Write manual system...
that weekly payroll was how we ended up processing it. It was closed to new entrants and numbers were dwindling as the old die-hards retired, and the younger members were tempted by small one-off cash sums to move to monthly pay. But we had a stubborn handful of about twenty employees who refused to move over. Costs were mounting, as the computing processing costs had a fixed element to them. The answer was to convert it back to the Safeguard One-Write manual system. These systems – some will remember the similar Kalamazoo system – involved using individual payslips attached to a backing sheet in batches of eight payslips. Each employee had a pay card, and the card was slipped between the payslip and the backing sheet. The calculation was then written out manually down the payslip, which carbonised onto the employee’s pay card and the backing sheet making two copies. A genius system and one I still use today for my wife’s payroll, adding the pay figures to HMRC’s PAYE Basic Tools for transmission to HMRC. But I understand from Safeguard I am one of the very few clients they have left using this system. n ● internal mail envelopes for sending all those memos around the building – each had about fifty small boxes printed on them for writing the next recipient’s details ● rubber stamps and ink pads – for stamping the compliments slips sent with final salary cheque payments and which indicated the contents of the final salary envelope. I still have a pack of that carbon paper, proudly bearing the HMSO crown logo. I know it will come in handy one day. Here’s a list of some essential items in a 1980s payroll office which you are unlikely to see today: ● carbon(ised) paper in various sizes – for making duplicates of all those handwritten memos ● a wooden ruler in inches – used mainly to read off the correct entries on the tax and NICs tables ● an ashtray – even MRC, my employer, which had funded the research that first discovered smoking causes cancer, allowed smoking in all its offices until the mid-1990s(!)
one of them was off-cycle payments. Any late starters or leavers required a manual payment to be calculated, and that meant getting the income tax and National Insurance contributions (NICs) tables out. Not only that, your calculation had to be recorded long-hand and in a style that was legible to all. I must admit I introduced the first written tests of payroll knowledge to our hiring process, partly to check knowledge and ability to perform that all important manual calculation, but also to check the candidates’ handwriting skills. Without the internet to answer all those questions we now solve regularly in seconds, researching queries was somewhat more time-consuming and frustrating. We maintained an up-to-date library of all the Inland Revenue (as HM Revenue & Customs was then known) publications, but for more detailed queries we often had to be able to refer to actual legislation which you had to order from Her Majesty’s Stationary Office (HMSO). It was one of my tasks to read the new HMSO publications list every Monday morning to see if we needed to order anything. Communication between departments and business locations was by letter and written memo. All letters had to be typed by the department typist and it routinely took two days to get your typing back. Instructions to make a payment to an employee often came by handwritten memo, which needed to be coded with the relevant UNIPAY data code, and typed into a series of ‘green screen’ data entry screens to update the payroll system. I’m sure those who have used UNIPAY can still remember many of the codes that had to be entered. I joined the British Payroll Managers Association (BPMA) in 1991. Logically, as I worked for a public sector organisation, I should have joined APSA (Association of Payroll and Superannuation Administrators) but the more commercial operation of the BPMA appealed to me. The quarterly meetings held in the Solihull area were a revelation. Here was a group of over one hundred payroll managers all talking my language. I will always be very grateful to the MRC for giving me the opportunity to progress and develop my career through my BPMA
membership which they supported and encouraged. Although it must have been tough for my head of department to maintain that enthusiasm, as every time I came back from one of those meetings it was with news about some infringement of the tax and NICs rules, which invariably cost MRC money. It also whetted my appetite for professional development and improvement, and I was an enthusiastic attendee at any training event that I could get my employer to support. When the BPMA created its first qualification I signed up, and in September 1992 I obtained the Certificate of Payroll Proficiency after a two-day course/examination held in Bristol. From these modest beginnings it is great to see the depth of qualifications that the Institute has come to offer. Today’s students are certainly tested and put in far more work than we would have thought possible. Our office paid around 7,500 employees, MRC studentship holders and pensioners. As well as two monthly and one quarterly payroll, we still had a weekly payroll. This payroll had the most exotic of pay methods: as well as BACS transfer, there were Bank of England cheque payments, Giro cheques and good old cash. Giro cheques were an interesting feature: they were uncrossed cheques, and the usual method of encashing them was for the recipient to take them to a post office counter (which had to be named on the cheque) where they would be exchanged for cash. The cheques themselves were a work of art – they had a wonderfully detailed portrait of Alfred the Great on them. Each had to be manually typed up from a pay-list by the typist. The cheques had a maximum face value of £250 which in those days was more than enough to cover a weekly employee’s net pay. Occasionally we would have to use them to pay a recently arrived new foreign employee who had yet to open a UK bank account – sending ten of these cheques out to the same named person often prompted a telephone enquiry from the Post Office asking if we had meant to do that. I’m not sure the Post Office, or indeed any bank would deliver that level of customer service today. Perhaps the strangest thing about
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 59 | April 2020
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