Angela: Oddly enough, I didn’t dream of this as a career when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a whole suite of things. But, I made the decision to be an accountant. So, I started off my career as a staff accountant, with payroll as a really interesting collateral duty. Of course, at the time payroll was something that nobody really wanted to do. I progressed to doing payroll and bookkeeping work for a small firm where I really had to learn to access government resources and have contacts with regulatory authorities. You start to recognize, when there’s an issue, like “We hired a guy in France, so now let’s
In that governance group, there is a mix of payroll professionals and nonpayroll people, but the team is led by a payroll professional. The nonpayroll folks are data analysts; they are really savvy in data cleansing and understanding the best ways to not just visualize information, but know the storytelling behind it. This set-up allows us to project a level of consistency and those standards to all the regions, and helps manage the constant scaling up and scaling down. GPA: How did you get into payroll and progress to this leadership role?
figure out how to pay this person in France.” It was baptism by fire, but you get into a rhythm. It was crazy. From there I did payroll in the home mortgage industry, then onto working with an airline, a global retail coffee company, then with a major hotel chain, and now I love that I get to support people that support education. GPA: What projects are you working on? Angela: What I have found is our technology providers or service providers generally can cover up to about 80% of our needs. To be fair, every client is different. Everyone has their own mix of what they need to do in-house as opposed to outsourcing. But, we are focusing on how we fill our gap, that 20%. Why? Because with most companies, it’s spreadsheets. It’s emails. It’s walking to your counterpart’s desk and
Interestingly, payroll is not alone in having a gap to fill. Every department has it. I think sometimes we get really caught in our own head and we think we have to solve all the problems by ourselves.
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ISSUE 9 GLOBAL PAYROLL MAGAZINE
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