TECHNOLOGY
Karen Thomson MSc ChFCIPPdip FHEA, partner and head of payroll at Armstrong Watson, details how technology and artificial intelligence have enhanced the payroll profession, improving efficiency and providing essential data
I ’m always willing to shout from the in it, as well as those on the periphery such as our information technology, pensions and human resources (HR) colleagues. It’s often been said that payroll professionals are the unsung heroes within a business who keep all key workers, including ourselves, paid. roof tops about how proud I am of my profession and all those working within Memory lane Those who know me know I love to tell a story and as mine spans more than 30 years now, I will try and keep this one brief! My story begins with working out the gross part of payroll as a third party used software to provide the net pay figures. However, to do the gross pay – in this case, for police officers and civilians – you received paper forms for overtime, salary changes, promotions, expenses and so much more. In blue pen, you then had to put the payment figures into a Kalamazoo sheet in massive leather-bound books, and any deductions in red pen. Once this was done, someone checked it all. After the check was done, it was time to transfer this information from the permanent police record to the dot matrix computer paper. Again, payments needed to be in blue and deductions in red. This involved an individual reading out loud from the Kalamazoo sheet and someone else writing it down on the dot matrix paper and yes, you guessed it, it was all then checked by someone else. This could take hours – or even days – depending on how much data changed. There was no such thing as Outlook back then, so everything was couriered and queries handled by telephone, albeit I do think we had push buttons by then. As the Microsoft applications started to take over from the likes of Lotus (used for accounts and what we now call spreadsheets) and Word replaced Word Perfect, the internet arrived and payroll computer packages started to become much more affordable, so payroll commenced its journey into the modern day world. However, even with computerised payroll systems in place, the records were still manual, payslips often
still kept in paper format or microfiche film. I know of some firms even today that might use an old payroll system and still have paper files for employee or client records. The world today Bringing us back to today’s world, at Armstrong Watson we have a good in- house client record system for payroll. The payroll manual is electronic but doesn’t use Word. To use it with ease and process payrolls you do need a few screens; one for the record to know the terms and conditions for the client, one for the payroll system and another one for the other ad- hoc requirements we need. So, I thought about this and wondered, if we went back to just one screen as we only had with the massive block monitors, was paper easier than electronic? Imagine, you walk up to a file, pop it on your desk, read from it and enter it into your computer. Then consider minimising one screen, maximising another, etc. Which would be quicker? But here we are in a modern world, with robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and a few products around now. I started with ChatGPT but at work we have Copilot. There are still many sceptics, not just in our profession but in others too, such as accounting. However, let’s have a look at some of the areas I have managed to fit more work in a day than I would have without AI. Imagine you are interviewing someone and haven’t yet written the questions. Ask your Copilot and in seconds they are there, ready for you to tweak. What would have taken maybe 30 minutes to an hour is quickly done. Now let’s look at something around understanding your data. Many of us rely on a payroll system to pay people, HR systems for recording personnel data, finance systems for accounts and so on. Imagine having a dashboard, perhaps something like Power Bi where all your systems data went into one place, but using the Power Bi you could access it all in one place. I hear you asking yourself where AI would fit in. I can use Copilot to query all my data – eg produce an Excel report with employee name, date of birth,
gender, ethnicity from the HR side, salary and other components and pension from payroll, oncosts and expenses from the finance system – and as if by magic it is all there, ready to export, or put into graphic formats, etc. previously you would have had a spreadsheet open, gone into each system to pull what you needed from each, combine in and hope all okay, but imagine a 500-person employee base, or multiple clients you had to do this for? AI doesn’t replace us; it can make us look great and efficient. In a previous issue I considered how to get onto a board and be noticed. Well, this is the kind of forecasting information you can very quickly produce to impress and, of course, use! Another key area still being explored, mainly due to cost, is robotics. Some payroll software is automating actions, such as basic salary payroll running by itself in the background, submitting real time information returns overnight once payrolls are finalised, producing P32 letters for clients if you’re a provider, or even ensuring what happens in your payroll system transfers to a process software package or your dashboards. Celebrating success We often see how wonderful our profession is on social media. Celebrating success happens daily – whether it’s winning an award, being nominated and shortlisted for the CIPP Annual Excellence Awards, or being named colleague of the month. Whatever the celebration, it’s there for the world to see. In terms of the social media to use for sharing it, my personal preference is LinkedIn. So, let’s shout about our achievements, as well as those of our colleagues, friends and family. By doing this we show the world what a wonderful and rewarding profession payroll is; this is why I am so proud to be a payroll professional. Why not share with the CIPP membership team what makes you proud? And finally, while National Payroll Week’s been and gone this year, remember you always have next year to celebrate our wonderful profession within your organisation. n
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 104 | October 2024
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