Individual entry example

Pay Awards 2008 entry form: Payroll Manager of the Year

Details of person being nominated:

Sarah Smith has been managing the payrolls of Medium Manufacturing for four years. She joined Medium Manufacturing in 2000 as a payroll administrator - she had previously worked as account assistant. When she completed her payroll qualifications she was promoted to the position of payroll manager. The payroll had been managed by a bureau service, but as the company was growing Medium Manufacturing wanted to bring the payroll in-house.

Sarah was already working as an administrator and because she knew the company well the Finance Director, Peter Hallam, decided to wait till Sarah had completed her training and promote her, rather than recruiting externally. She completed her diploma in June 2003, achieving a distinction, and brought the MM payrolls in-house in October of that year.

Sarah has seen to it that each team member has the ability to multi-task and cover each role, whilst giving each of her assistants the opportunity to develop the processes individual to their particular job.

She is currently supporting one of the team as they study for their diploma. She has done this through study sessions and providing them with time off during working hours for study purposes.

A workload guidance sheet produced by Sarah ensures that other departments are aware of payroll’s schedule and workload and also makes sure holidays are taken by the payroll team at less busy times.

Medium Manufacturing has used the same expenses processes for years. A paper expenses form is filled in by the employee; the form and the receipts are then checked by the employee’s line manager and sent to finance for processing. The Finance Director had identified this process as an area where there was a lot of room for improvement, both in terms of compliance and employee satisfaction.

Sarah and the member of the finance team responsible for processing expenses were appointed to lead an expenses taskforce to identify and implement a new process. Sarah and the finance team member considered using existing finance or payroll software and after considering the procedures that would be necessary agreed that a module available as part of our payroll software offered the best opportunity.

Sarah was also instrumental, as a result of her knowledge on tax compliance, in helping write a new expenses policy to enable MM to obtain revised and updated dispensations from our tax office.

As a result of the taskforce work Sarah took on the project leader role. With the help of the finance and payroll teams she developed an entirely new process. Employees now fill in an online form. Once they have submitted the form their line manager receives an email alerting them to the fact the form is ready for online approval. The same process applies for finance once the form has been approved. Receipts are sent to accounts once the form is approved.

Once finance has approved the expenses the system automatically generates a payment order which goes to the payroll software. Once a week the payroll team approves all payment orders and they are paid the next day. As a result employees can receive expenses payments in as little as four days.

Previously employees typically had to wait two weeks or more between filling the form in and receiving payment. Both finance and payroll and have signed up to a service level agreement of payment within seven working days from receiving the line manager’s approval.

Salary sacrifice:

A salary sacrifice scheme was introduced by Sarah and the HR team three years ago. For the next couple of years take-up was steady with 25-30% of staff taking part both years. While the management felt this was a good percentage they felt in order for the scheme to be truly valuable the numbers needed to grow.

Sarah and the HR manager in charge of benefits were chosen to spearhead a drive to increase take-up. While the HR manager focused on communicating the existence of the scheme, Sarah focused on explaining how it worked and the tax/NICs advantages for participants. She and her team toured our offices explaining how the scheme worked and what it meant for take-home pay.

Why should the nominee win the award (the judges
will be looking for practical examples and statistics to back up your statements):
[max of 600 words]

Sarah Smith should be Payroll Manager of the Year 2008 because she has taken on a great deal of responsibility in a short space of time and all the initiatives she has worked on or led at Medium Manufacturing have had a real impact, both on the business bottom line and on employee satisfaction with payroll. During 2007, payroll accuracy reached 99.8%, which is a good improvement from the days of outsourcing where accuracy had dropped to 88.6%.

In the last year there have been two big projects which Sarah has led that highlight why she should win the award. The first relates to our expenses programme and the second to the salary sacrifice scheme (see above for details).

Expenses results:

The system has been in place for six months now and in 86% of cases the SLA is being met. Where it is not being met this is generally due to incorrect data or lack of receipts. No expense payment has taken longer than 12 days since the new system was introduced.

Sarah was the driver behind the new expenses procedure and has already been recognised internally for her work, having receiving an award in our quarterly awards programme. 

Salary sacrifice results:

A calculation tool developed by Sarah and her team played a big part in increasing take-up. At every presentation the team did they showed how the tool could be used and helped people understand the results. The tool, which demonstrated the tax and NICs advantages for employees of utilising salary sacrifice to receive, for example, childcare vouchers, was also available on the internet. Take-up increased to 40% this year – the sort of increase the senior managers were looking for.

Payroll rating:

Medium Manufacturing carries out employee satisfaction surveys every year. The survey gather views on the various departments which service our employees, such as HR, finance, IT and payroll, and employee opinions on line managers etc.

The payroll department is providing a very good service according to 95% of respondents and 90% said problems were dealt with professionally and as quickly as possible. This compares well with HR’s ratings of 70% and 65% respectively.

The most regular comments were about the work done by Sarah and her team to promote the salary sacrifice scheme, with even some of those employees who have not taken part saying that the payroll team had given them the information to make a conscious decision rather than not taking part because they didn’t understand.

Sarah herself received a very good rating from her team, who all identified her as a manager who pitches in and listens to her employees, but who takes responsibility and makes the big decisions.

Bringing payroll in-house:

While the Finance Director was reasonably happy with the service provided by the bureau he felt that bringing the service in-house would allow the company to provide a better and more immediate service for its employees.

Since taking over the payroll in 2003 his hopes have been realised, as Sarah and her team (recruited after she completed her training), working with the HR team, have amongst other things ensured that the overall accuracy rates have steadily improved.

An endorsement
from the  line manager of the person being nominated:
[max of 500 words]

Name of line manager: Peter Hallam
Job title: Finance director
Email address: peterhallam@mediummanufacturing.test

Endorsement:
I have worked with Sarah Smith for six years now and can confidently say that she is one of the most innovative and responsive payroll managers I have worked with in my long career.

When I was considering bringing the payroll function in-house the one thing that was not a worry was whether we could find someone suitable to manage the payroll. Even though Sarah was a payroll administrator at that time I was confident she knew payroll and our business to a level that would ensure she did a fantastic job and I have been proved right.

The first big challenge for Sarah was setting up suitable payroll software enabling us to bring the payroll in-house and she did it with minimum of fuss and no problems at all. Sarah confidently organised the forward planning to do with the switch between off-site processing and our own in-house function despite being in the midst of finishing her payroll management diploma at the time.

In the most recent year she has grown take-up of our salary sacrifice scheme to 40% from 27% the previous year. This was achieved through promotion and the development of a calculation tool. Sarah developed the tool with the help of our IT team. It shows employees how any possible choices will impact on their monthly pay. 

In our most recent employee satisfaction survey Sarah's payroll department achieved the highest rating of any department which provides internal services, with 95% of respondents saying the payroll team provided a very good service and 90% saying problems were dealt with professionally and as quickly as possible.

Finally Sarah and her team achieved a 99.8% accuracy on payroll for both the monthly and weekly payroll. Before Sarah took over payroll accuracy was much poorer, but changes she has made to internal processes have led to the improvement.