REWARD
management involved. The payroll team itself will have its own workloads to be managed and distributed appropriately to ensure processing timelines are met. Alongside this are the other stakeholders involved and managing them and their expectations through the process – whether they are clients, managers, directors or end employees. Handling these relationships is imperative for a smooth payroll process. These skills are highly sought-after and any payroller looking to move to another function would be able to use their people management prowess wherever they chose to land. Software and systems In any role within a business there is a certain level of expectation around systems competency. The MS Office Suite is one example, but payroll, among others, is an area of business where large number of different software and systems are used, so the ability to be able to not only use but deeply understand all of these is often overlooked by the profession. The ability to take, understand, process and reconcile data from various output systems (time and attendance, human resources, finance) and then be able to translate this
“Any payroller looking to move to another function would be able to use their people management prowess wherever they chose to land”
into a payroll system or two, calculate the payroll and then pay employees using Bacs or Faster Payments all in a short timeframe is not to be taken for granted. There are then the indirect tasks of providing pensions information and updating customer relationship management with relevant data. All this combined gives the payroll profession a good base of understanding across a multitude of software / systems and the ability to get up to speed quickly on any new ones that are put in front of them. Related to software is one of the more obvious skills that is translatable to any role relating to spreadsheets, as I am fully aware of myself following my move from frontline payroll to the payments industry. The time spent using and understanding these is certainly transferable and will most likely gain you a reputation at any new job as the “go to” for help with them. Functions that we see as standard often are not understood by the wider world; XLOOKUP,
IF Statements and Conditional Formatting are all things I have been asked to help with.
Presenting While handling data and financial
information we’re often asked to portray this to other areas of the business, so our presentation skills and ability to deliver this side of the role are highly sought- after attributes. This includes not only the ability to produce presentations in the first place and convey the appropriate data within it, but also standing up and delivering the accompanying speech. As a function we often feed into director level from a finance perspective and relay key information to this area as payroll will often be an organisation’s highest outlay. Being able to present key payroll changes to employees where required was extremely pertinent during Covid so everyone understood what was happening, and now this is also the case with the recent National Insurance changes. n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 103 | September 2024
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