10 reasons to fall in love with payroll

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. February 14 marks the celebration when lovers express their affection for each other with gifts and greetings. How about celebrating Valentine’s Day a little differently this year and expressing our love for the job we do every day?

There are many reasons why people love their jobs. Loving what you do makes work a lot easier—especially when times are challenging and there is a lot at stake, as is often the case in payroll.

Nevertheless, working in payroll is absolutely worth it. Here are 10 reasons to fall in love with payroll.

It’s an old cliché that working in payroll means carrying out the same routine tasks over and over again. The truth is, however, that payroll is very varied and challenging.

Every day can bring something new and you never know what you’ll get. For instance, there are frequent legal changes affecting payroll, and payroll managers and specialists have to keep up to date with all the regulatory changes to ensure payroll compliance.

It’s no secret that payroll is an absolutely crucial business function. The reason for this is very simple. Payroll has a direct impact on the lives of all the company’s employees. If anything goes wrong, it will have consequences for everyone on the payroll.

Payroll errors, such as underpayments or missed payments, can put an employee’s financial wellbeing at risk. Especially those employees who live from paycheck to paycheck will be put in a very delicate position if wages and salaries are paid late.

In the worst case, late or missed salary payments mean that they won’t be able to pay their rent or buy groceries for their families.

Payroll is all about crunching numbers, everybody knows that. But is it really like that? There is no doubt that transforming raw numbers into valuable payroll data and business insights with the help of payroll analytics is a big part of the process. But there is more to payroll than meets the eye.

At the end of the day, payroll is also highly people-oriented. It’s about providing support to employees, answering their questions, and helping them get over their concerns.

Work is always more fun when you don’t have to do it alone. While there are one-person payroll departments, payroll functions in large organizations typically involve a large payroll team composed of various payroll professionals fulfilling different roles.

The many challenges and complexities of payroll require the members of the payroll team to work shoulder to shoulder to overcome hurdles and issues together. This creates a close-knit unit and a sense of belonging that is rarely found in other departments.

When asked how they ended up in payroll, most payroll professionals will answer something along the lines of “I never intended to work in payroll, it just happened”. There are very few payrollers who actively chose a career in payroll. For the large majority, however, it was the other way round, with payroll choosing them.

Payroll is more than just numbers. It is incredibly complex, varied, and versatile. Processing and managing payroll means working in a cross-functional way and drawing on many different aspects like tax regulations, employment laws, compensation rules, and more. With so many different aspects, there is always something new to learn—especially as the law is constantly changing.

This brings us to the next reasons to love payroll. Payroll is ever-evolving. Since payroll is linked to so many different other fields and industries, it is also impacted by major trends in these industries and areas of business. Common examples are technological advances, HR trends, and workplace trends, such as the growing focus on creating a positive employee experience, which payroll most definitely plays a big role in.

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With payroll being so versatile, payrollers need a broad variety of skills in order to be successful. Over the course of their career, payroll professionals get the chance to acquire many different skills, from problem solving to customer service to savviness in using technology and data analytics tools.

The payroll team is not only the first point of contact for pay-related questions from employees. Members of management also rely on the payroll function for advice and recommendations.

Payroll specialists are the only people in an organization who have access to the data that is needed for informing business decisions and know how to interpret this data correctly. That’s one of the reasons why automation will not replace the payroll manager.

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Last but not least, payroll is anything but boring. Despite the widespread conception of payroll as being an unexciting back-office function, the reality paints a different picture. With payroll, you never know what you’ll get when you arrive at the office to start a new workday.

New challenges and problems can arise every day, forcing payrollers to jump into action and find creative solutions to overcome them. This could be new legislation that has unrealized consequences for payroll processes and hence requires internal policies and workflows to be adapted.