A week in the life of
Alanoosh Williams MCIPP, Head of payroll, Agilisys
M y team and I all have certain jobs to complete during the payroll cycle. Every Monday, we draw up a schedule for the week ahead with the team bringing to the table anything they may have scheduled. We review task lists and any requests that have come in as well as business- as-usual to map out the week. We use the schedules for audit purposes which also covers us in case of absence. I highly recommend doing this for your teams. Here is a sample week from 19 October.
Tuesday
on any complex issues we may have. I finished the day raising two reports for the HR director.
I had eight separate calls on various subjects, ranging from wellbeing calls, NHS pensions, calls with PWC on taxation advice, and meetings working on calculating furlough for our different client payrolls. As being a home-worker does mean more meetings/calls, I now try to allow fifteen minutes after each call so I can send follow up emails or complete any actions. Tuesdays I ensure any admin is cleared, and work through to-do lists to clear any outstanding actions.
Thursday
I attended an online legal webinar which discussed current legislation and provided a recap of where we are with the coronavirus schemes as well as employment law. Just two calls today and three reports to issue with a weekly meeting mid-afternoon with the system teams. We discuss any outstanding change requests, impact analysis documents for future installs, any issues which may have come up during the week, and future roadmap items. The rest of the day is spent on reviewing benefits and reconciling staff data against all the various schemes for upcoming renewals.
Monday
Wednesday
I try and schedule all regular calls and, meetings with the heads of the teams to work on the payroll schedules. I always start the day by clearing all emails from my inbox. We all work on a clear inbox policy for our own personal emails, and we have a service level agreement of two working days for the payroll box. I may receive emails asking for on- costs from finance, or benefit renewals queries, complex queries etc or receive requests for reports, as examples, so these are also factored in the payroll schedule meeting. We have three main process documents for our BACS process, end-to-end payroll process and our contractors’ department. These are scheduled for review throughout the year, and today I reviewed the entire contractor document to ensure processes and legislation are still correct and the documents are used by the team in real time. I moved onto submitting BACS for client payrolls and finished the day raising invoices for our client payroll costs.
I had five separate calls on various subjects, commencing with our weekly leadership call, consisting of a full round up from the different leads in the business, chaired by the chief executive officer, briefing us on the business, followed by calls on various business topics. I helped the team clear some payroll emails as we were inundated with queries. We currently have 39 automated email signatures for generic queries which helps with the traffic, which for example range from tax code queries, where to update personal details, opting out of pensions. These are reviewed monthly as part of our key performance indicators (KPIs). As we are all so busy, it is easy to be separated from what is going on within the business, so I always set time aside to look at the company channels on teams and I spend time keeping up to date with my colleagues around the business by viewing all their posts. I also had a fortnightly session with my senior payroll executive. We have a set agenda which allows us to review and work on project work and tie up any loose ends
Friday
I try to keep Fridays clear so I can carry out weekly audits on payroll input. We do tend to audit 90% of our input to ensure our KPIs are as close to 100% as possible. Most of the audit is done in real time as we also issue leaver letters, hour-changes letters, etc, so these are audited at the same time as employees can view the data in real time. We are looking to transfer our pension services to a different provider, so we had some new systems demonstrated today. I raise a report on annual leave for the business, and then review all the reports I had recently issued. For any required more regularly, rather than a one-off, I submit a change request document to the iTrent System team to see if these could be automated. n
To feature in AWITLO please contact editor@cipp.org.uk
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | February 2021 | Issue 67 12
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker