Payroll – More Than Press the Button (a BPO perspective)

If you are working in the business I am almost certain that somewhere in the time you’ve already heard this expression, well… given my 10 year experience I could not be more against it because it diminishes the complex work that it’s done in this area of human resources.

We can start to analyze this from the point of view that we are dealing with one of the most sensitive issues in people’s lives, their money! Here it’s the importance of guarantee a payroll system that it’s zero error policy and to prepare the team to be able to filter all the situations before sending THOSE reports to the client.

It doesn’t matter why you got a salary transfer wrong it is one of the things that CANNOT happen!  

Besides that, we are also dealing with the contributive career of the employees and we have to guarantee that we report all the contributions accurately so the social security works completely when the employee needs, whether for retirement, disease or paternity licenses.

It’s important that the companies recognize the importance of payroll services, which has to be led by a specialized team that not only process salaries but knows ALL the legislation applicable and has resources to comply completely with the labor obligations. This is when you know you are able to give an excellent service instead of executing some numbers.

The payroll technician has the important role to understand every line that appears in THAT payslip and to be able to de-construct it from “head to toe”.

This is basically why I am so passionate about my job, against all odds I discovered that payroll is not the poor relation in Human Resources, it’s challenging and you don’t get 2 equal days in a row, instead you learn and grow as fast as you want to.

My job is to lead a wonderful team of payroll technicians and what I love the most is to get to see their professional growing and to be certain that THESE professionals are getting abilities that make them invincible before any challenge.

It’s important to do what we like, but even more important to like what we do and arrange strategies to improve our service quality EVERY day. We have to change mentalities!

By Patricia Dias, Payroll Manager at Auxadi Portugal (BPO services)

January 2016