National Payroll Week 2020

Launching on the 7th September 2020, National Payroll Week is raising awareness of the impact of payroll and celebrating the hard-working payroll pioneers who keep the UK paid.

The pandemic has put payroll in the spotlight. Without payroll workers, people wouldn’t get paid and to put it simply, businesses wouldn’t be able to operate. That’s why the Department for Education officially named payroll staff as ‘key workers’ in March 2020 to make sure that they could perform their jobs safely and effectively and help businesses stay afloat.

Throughout this disruptive and challenging time, payroll staff around the country have continued to work tirelessly to ensure that their people got paid. Many worked overtime and at weekends, while dealing with complex new legislative updates, such as furlough, flexible furlough and statutory sick pay due to Covid-19.

The coronavirus Job retention Scheme (CJRS) wasn’t just used by a small number of businesses. According to data by the government, 9.6 million employees were furloughed through CJRS for at least part of the period between March to June. These claims have been made by 1.16 million employers, with 61% of eligible employers claiming. That’s equals a lot of complicated calculations handled by payroll staff.

Even when there isn’t an ongoing global pandemic, payroll is extremely complicated. The complexity varies depending on the size of your organisation and the industry you operate in. For example, an enterprise manufacturing organisation may have thousands of employees with different employment types, including shift workers, contractors, part-time, apprentices and more. Or a mid-market retail company may employ students and seasonal workers across multi-site locations.

Then there’s outsourced payroll teams who handle multiple payroll projects at once, often looking after organisations with large employee numbers and complicated payroll set ups across the globe. These teams not only support with the end-to-end processing of payroll, but they provide guidance and expertise on challenges such as legislation and last-minute adjustments to make sure their customer’s payroll is accurate and compliant.

Payroll ticks along in the background, making sure everyone gets paid accurately and on time. Often, we only take notice of payroll if something goes wrong. Yet, payroll workers do more than just processing payments.

They help to save employees money, through salary-sacrifice and benefits-in-kind, and payroll contributes towards the UK economy through National Insurance and income tax (which is estimated to have contributed around £325.7bn in 2020/21.) Every year they process P11D forms and ensure that employee benefits-in-kind are submitted correctly to HMRC.

Since April 2019, employers must provide payslips to all employees with a breakdown if there is variation in hours worked. As you can imagine, this means payroll workers spend a lot of time answering employee queries about their payslip (unless they have SD Worx’s digital payslips with configurable messages, which has been proven to reduce queries on payday by 75%.) Plus, they are the guardians of an organisation’s sensitive data; providing a robust audit trail to demonstrate when data was added, by whom and when to help their organisation stay transparent and compliant.

At SD Worx, we’re known for being the ‘Payroll People’ and we have some pretty amazing individuals who love payroll just as much as we do. But now it’s over to you. Did a payroll pioneer come to mind when you were reading this blog?

We want you to recognise an individual at your organisation who you feel goes above and beyond for payroll. Whether they’re a payroll pioneer, an HR hero, or a forward-thinking finance leader, we want to champion the people that are committed to keeping the UK paid.

Nominate them using the link below to celebrate their success and be entered into our prize draw.