Payrollers, as anyone outside the industry will most definitely not tell you, are superheroes. We deliver on time, every time, by solving other people’s problems, making things happen despite everyone else’s mission to sabotage delivery by deadlines, and making the hard choices to save the world.
We’re invisible. We can toil away with a metric tree-tonne of timesheets, grapple with statutory pay loopholes and convince obstreperous software to just work, and like ninjas, no-one will see us do it. In fact, we’re completely, effectively, and in all other ways non-existent.
Until something goes wrong.
We’re payrollers, yes, but we’re also human. We are not infallible and sometimes we just make mistakes. But when other people make mistakes, it results in a box of ballpoint pens not turning up at reception, or a car being delivered to the wrong address the first time round. When we make mistakes, employees’ bills don’t get paid, direct debits bounce, cars go without petrol and people don’t get to work. It’s nothing short of the end of their world as they know it.
That’s when we move heaven and earth to bring payment to people seemingly effortlessly. Does that mean we save the world on a daily basis? You bet we do. I’ve seen it; I’ve done it.
Let me tell you a story.
We have a small team where I work. One of our payrollers, whose penchant for wearing dark colours that contrast her red hair and her ability to get things done without anyone noticing has earned her the nickname ‘Batwoman’, takes a phone call from a woman at 9:27am on pay day. The woman claims to be an employee and is demanding to know why she hasn’t been paid. Batwoman checks - there’s no record of her in our payroll-cum-HR system. Unwilling to share this distressing news, Batwoman takes down details with her namesake’s trademark calm and promises to call the woman back when she’s got to the bottom of the problem.
Her first stop: HR, whereupon she’s told that the woman is half set-up in the system but they’re waiting on being notified of her working her first day.
A-ha, says Batwoman, but she has worked her first day. It was 15th of the month.
Bother, says HR, as this is one day before the cut-off, which means she is due payment and HR really should have been made aware.
At this point it becomes obvious what has happened - or more accurately, what hasn’t happened. The moment she had worked her first day, the woman’s details should have been updated with HR and they could have finished setting her up in the system and then passed her starter paperwork to Payroll so we could add her to the pay run. The villain of the piece had been revealed, sadly not Scooby-Doo style, to be the line manager who had not informed anyone of the woman’s first day at work.
Batwoman is told that HR cannot sort the paperwork problem at the moment as they’re dealing with any one of the other 1,200 employees and their own little versions of armageddon - it could be 2 or 3 days before they can get to sorting it out.
Batwoman goes back to her desk, calmly picks up the phone and manages to get through to the line manager herself. Line manager says nuh-uh, too busy, and attempts to fob her off.
You can imagine how this went down.
Batwoman gets up, picks up a notebook and pen, and goes into one of the offices, kept available for just such an eventuality. She closes the glass, sound-proof door and sits down at the solitary desk and phone, in full view of everyone due to the ceiling-to-floor glass nature of the ‘wall’ of the office.
What is said is not known. What is caused to happen most definitely is; within ten minutes of coming back to her own desk, Batwoman has been emailed the pertinent paperwork, with HR copied in, so that the employee can be paid. She adds her to the run, rolls her for next month as this one is shut, and makes a same-day advance payment to the employee.
The satisfaction in her voice as she calls the employee back and gives her the news that she will receive money in the next hour is palpable. But when the employee thanks her over and over, she gives the same answer she gives everyone; “it’s what we’re here for”.
The satisfaction in her voice as she tells the Finance department, across the office, that the cost of making a same-day payment is coming out of a certain line manager’s budget is also palpable. An incident report is filed to explain the expense and also to give us something to try to avoid next time.
For the employee, the world was saved. For Payroll, we were left cleaning up a manager’s error on that day and also dealing with the advance in the next month. But Batwoman was right - it is what we’re here for. We are where the buck stops, where the thin blue line is drawn, where the chips hit the table.
Even when other departments or people fail, when we just don’t have the things we need, when it’s not our place to do it, we are still expected to produce money for people. Most of the time, we do. Batwoman took that call at 9:27am (the reason I know this is because we take bets on when the first complaint call or email will come in each pay day, and we all lost) and by noon it had been resolved to the employee’s satisfaction. She didn’t need to know the whys and wherefores - all she needed was the money she was owed. We did that; we made it happen. Everything else was something for line managers and Finance Directors to argue about after the fact. Luckily for us.
I like Batwoman; we get on. We’re both a ‘is it a 0 or a 1? No, it can’t be a 0.5; try again’ kind of person. And when we were getting fresh tea an hour after the miraculous advance payment had landed, we joked about how she’d saved another person’s world in record time.
Of course, the background superhero, the Alfred Pennyworth to all of our efforts, was the Payroll Manager. She made damn sure the reason (and expense) why Batwoman’s latest escapade had even happened was brought to the attention of all line managers (with names withheld to protect the guilty) at the next meeting.
Give us what we need, she told them, and we will deliver every time. And apparently, we deliver even when we’re not given what we need.
Superheroes are just like that, I suppose.
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