Would I be giving too much away if I told you that payroll as far as my first boss was concerned simply meant adding up all the hours worked throughout the week and then popping a couple of fivers in a small brown envelope? To those of you who responded to this true tale with the words, ‘Oh yes, the good old days’, I say, ‘Hello You!’ I will concede, however, that many readers will more likely have responded, ‘Really? You must be pretty ancient then?’ Yes well, moving swiftly on …!
True, the aforementioned experience is just a light hearted look back at payroll in its most simplistic form and many of our readers understand that payroll has become ever more complex year on year. Still, those of us working in payroll often hear the question, ‘What exactly do you do?’ It reminds me of a small poem (yes, penned by my own fair hand!):
To some it might seem that payroll is quite easy
One phrase we hear often is, ‘lemon squeezy’
Surely you just feed in the info, and computer says, ‘Yes’?
Payroll is done, so it’s feet on the desk
Time for a cuppa and a well-earned rest!
In reality, a day in the life of a Payroll Professional is far more wide ranging than people might imagine! Here are just a few of the activities we carry out:
- Process payroll for a wide range of business clients within sectors that include: Care Homes, Hospitality and Leisure, Schools, Charities, Solicitors & Professional, Medical Centres and GP’s, amongst others
- Organise workloads to ensure all payrolls are paid within strict timescales - this includes payrolls paid weekly, fortnightly, 4-weekly, monthly, often with pay dates covering every day in the working month
- Process starters and leavers; calculate salaries, other allowances, pay rises, back pay pensions and holiday pay; calculate SSP, SMP, SPP and SAP
- Use a combination of both manual inputting and importing of payroll information
- Check balances and accuracy by means of a number of checks
- Upload PDF’s and CSV’s to clients via a secure portal ePaysafe
- Send BACS
- Keep up to date with latest knowledge relevant to payroll such as Auto-enrolment, RTI, minimum wage rates etc. and implement according to required timescales
It is the growing complexity of payroll that is resulting in more and more businesses choosing to outsource their payroll to Dataplan. We have been specialising in payroll for over 40 years, our most recent award being the prestigious, CIPP 2013 Winner Payroll Service Provider of the Year.
Our clients can be confident that the breadth and depth of experience held by our staff, alongside the on-going training to keep up with the rapidly moving changes including RTI and Auto-enrolment, mean we have the experience and capability to look after all aspects of their payroll.
