Proactive Payroll Preparation

I started my role as a HR Assistant in November 2021 when Servicecare, Northampton had one department with a headcount of 58 employees and a brand-new department which had a headcount of 4 employees, (not including agency employees). As you can imagine, manually calculating payroll for these employees was a very challenging time, especially for someone who experienced huge anxiety when it came to do with anything that involved numbers and calculations.

Today, our departments currently have a headcount total of 67 and 18 with new starters in the pipeline and interviews pending. This also does not include the 30+ agency employees who I process payroll for every Monday morning. I have been fortunate enough to have a great Operations Manager who excels in mathematics and with his time, patience and teachings, within 3-4 months I was able to grasp these numbers and calculations to ensure everyone receives their correct monies in their payslip at the end of each month.

Knowing that both of our departments are thriving and growing, I decided to reflect on how I manage my payroll process to see how I could be more proactive. Below is a summary of the changes I made:

1)?????Electronically file as I go: as soon as I know I have a new starter/ leaver/ change of contractual or personal details form/ secondments/ maternity/ deductions/ expenses/ or any documents that payroll will need, I automatically scan these and file them in my payroll folder for the relevant month. This prevents a back log or information going missing.

2)?????Input holiday data at the beginning of the month: at the start of every month, I have a KPI report to submit. As I am already working on a report and I have annualised hours open, once completed, I then pull up the payroll report and submit all the holidays for the employees for the previous month. This saves a lot of time and reduces the pressure had I left it for the payroll cut off day.

3)?????Communicate in management meetings: I join management meetings for both departments every morning and they kindly discuss HR topics first so I am updated. I then share HR updates from my side. The verbal communication allows the management team to better understand why I require certain updates of information and they can ask me questions which I find to be more effective than sending emails. It also brings us all closer and helps us work much better as a team.

4)?????Payroll summary sent to management team: one week before and one day before payroll is due for submission, I email the management team with a payroll summary. This includes subheadings mentioned above: new starter/ leaver/ change of contractual or personal details form/ secondments/ maternity/ deductions/ expenses/ basically anything that payroll would submit which has been handed in. I then list the names of employees under each heading so managers can review and give feedback if something needs adding or taking out. This helps me so much, especially recently as we are rapidly growing and on-boarding new starters.

How do you currently manage your payroll? Do you wait for the payroll cut off day to complete everything, or, like myself, have you found ways to be more proactive? Either way I would love to know so please leave a comment of your experience/ thoughts/ or your own methods…