When we were young
...how many employees actually look at their payslip?
the payroll ready for payday. Local government reorganisation
happened in April 1974 and I became a member of the newly formed Suffolk County Council payroll team where I remained until 1986. During that time introduction of computers began which took up most of the desk and only allowed access to the payroll system (via the mainframe) to run reports etc. The first time I ever used a standalone computer was for a system called SuperCalc (the precursor to Excel) in order to develop reports to help with budget control and key performance indicators. We were still batching up our payroll data and using data preparation teams to enter the data to the system. I returned to Ipswich Borough in the summer of 1986 as the authority’s paymaster. During this period it was decided that the in-house system was to be replaced with the then state-of-the- art UNIPAY. Due to a restructuring the payroll team became integrated with the personnel group, and I was tasked with updating and amalgamating UNIPER with UNIPAY to form an integrated payroll and
personnel system. The movement from paper-based systems to electronic was at the time seen as to be quite unique. Many of the team’s comments – other than the “I am never going to cope with a keyboard and a screen” – were that the system must be wrong, and this employee’s sickness record is inaccurate. Yet, when we checked 99.9% of the time the manual record had been added incorrectly. I joined the British Payroll Managers
Association in 1988, and became a tutor for a forerunner of the CIPP in 1997. My career has taken me from Suffolk to Norfolk, Cumbria, Bedford, Wirral, Solihull, India and Poland but never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would spend 48 years of my life within the payroll world. At the start of this article I mentioned putting cash into employees’ pay packets then hand-delivering them. Today with many payroll teams serving thousands of employees, sending their pay directly to their bank and their payslips electronically, I often sit and wonder how many employees actually look at their payslip? Or do they, as I suspect, just check their bank account from their phone to see what has been paid? They do not know what they are
missing by not looking at them. Well, for a career that I did not
specifically choose I have had an amazing time, seen some fantastic developments – and of course made some great friends. n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 60 | May 2020
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