COMPLIANCE
What are soft skills, and how can they be used most effectively?
Payroll’s journey
Neil Tonks ChMCIPPdip, legislation manager, MHR, looks back over time and considers just how much the payroll profession has changed P ayroll is a discipline which has changed rapidly. It has evolved from an often manual paper-based having to submit a manually generated paper version of the full payment submission (FPS) every week?
pattern of holes representing that character being punched into the card. The cards only held 80 characters of data so, as you can imagine, there were a lot of them. Once the task was completed, the batch of cards was fed into the computer’s card reader. This detected the punched holes and uploaded the data they represented onto the computer, which then carried out the calculation of gross and net pay. Paper reports were produced and sent back to the payroll team for checking. The whole rigmarole had to be repeated to resolve errors, although the process was surprisingly accurate and relatively few were detected. You can imagine the time this took. As a result, the payment workers received each Friday was for a week which ended the previous Thursday. Even then, meeting the deadlines was difficult and overtime was frequently required. The high cost of computers put them out of reach for small companies at
process to today’s online, multi-functional cloud systems within 50 years. This has been driven by changes to payroll itself, along with technological advances. Payroll has become more complex as pay and reward practices have evolved, and governments have loaded work onto employers. For instance, pensions became far more challenging with the advent of automatic enrolment, while salary sacrifice was unheard of not all that long ago. In addition, statutory payments and the collection of student and postgraduate loan repayments have become the employer’s responsibility, while real time information changed an annual provision of earnings information to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) into something which must be done every time people are paid. Advances in technology are the facilitator of change: can anyone imagine
What was payroll like back in the 1980s? When I first came across payroll in the early 1980s, the process at the small company I worked for was a world away from current practice. Workers filled in paper timesheets, which the payroll team transcribed by hand onto coding sheets in a format determined by the payroll bureau the company used. At the bureau, these handwritten documents were manually transcribed again, this time onto punched cards, using a machine with a typewriter keyboard. Each press of a key resulted in a
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | May 2023 | Issue 90 22
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