The most important reason for any person to work is the "bottom line": being paid. For most workers, the simple fact of the matter is that, depending on their shift, they will turn up for work in the morning and leave in the evening; and, when the month is over, they will get their paycheck and their salary will go into their bank. It is perfectly simple. What few people give any thought to is that somebody puts the money in their bank account or cuts the check. There is, effectively, an invisible link between the work they do and the money they earn for it.
The truth is that that invisible link is actually one or more persons whose job is to ensure that a company's employees get their remuneration in full, on time, and without any need to request it themselves. It is far from automatic and actually requires quite a bit of work on the part of the people responsible for making the payments. These people are the payroll staff. Their job is, in some people's minds, an afterthought; but there is one simple fact that we need to keep in mind: If the payroll staff were not there, or did not do its job, then the very reason these workers are turning up in the morning would be thrown into question. If people did not get paid, there would be quite a lot of turmoil involved.
WHAT DOES THE PAYROLL DEPARTMENT DO?
The payroll staff is a vitally important part of any large company. Although the department name lends itself to a belief that its members are concerned solely with pay matters, the payroll department plays a major part in the human resources side of most companies. Often when a person is involved in some sort of scandal, his past employers get dragged into the media furor and respond to all questions by simply saying, "This individual is no longer on our payroll." The term "payroll," to a large extent, has become shorthand for the overall workforce of a company. In this respect, a company's payroll department has many responsibilities regarding the overall workforce. The department is not only important, it is essential. Not only does it have responsibility for seeing that the staff gets paid, it has a major administrative role in the company.
The payroll department needs to hold a lot of additional information on staff members, though. With the large variation of benefits and deductions that are connected with an individual's salary, the payroll department needs to know from month to month what a person is owed in terms of these benefits and what that person must pay in terms of deductions. These deductions will include taxes but may also apply to healthcare packages, student loan repayments, pension plans, and savings accounts.
RECORD-KEEPING
The payroll department of each business is charged with the responsibility of keeping a vast range of records on the company's workforce. The department has to send weekly or monthly pay stubs to employees according to a company's pay period, so it needs to keep addresses on file. Employee phone numbers are on file, too. However, this is just one part of record-keeping. Every payroll department also needs to retain a whole range of information on past employees for tax purposes, among other things.
When one refers to a company, it is not uncommon to refer to it as an organization. This is not an accident of language; the important thing about a payroll department is that it is organized. A company in any given month will deal with any number of requests for information and inquiries ranging from the most basic to some that are very complicated. It needs to have this information readily available at short notice and be able to transmit it in various forms. Payroll employees may be asked to e-mail details confirming the length of service of a past employee. They may be asked to confirm verbally that an individual was once employed by a company. An individual may ask for copies of old pay stubs for the purposes of a tax return or a loan application. Add this to the more basic requests where a current employee may call on any given day for confirmation of details regarding his or her salary, such as date of issue or amount, and it is easy to see just how much information a company needs to hold.
Other records that must be kept include the number of hours an employee works in a given month. The employer will keep time sheets detailing when an employee is at work: for how long, on which days, and any overtime logged. This is so that an employee gets paid correctly and is rewarded for her or his presence in the workplace. Failing to safeguard this system will have ill effects in the short and long terms and can even lead to employees leaving their jobs through dissatisfaction with their employer.
There is another reason that a company needs to hold and organize a range of information, and it has become more important in the last decade or so. This is the fact that a majority of workers in this day and age receive payment by electronic transfer into a bank account at the end of the month. To ensure that this is done promptly and accurately, the employee needs to supply their employer with their bank details at the outset of their employment. We all know of horror stories in which people had their bank details stolen or lost and suffered extremely harrowing experiences as a result.
For this reason, it is vitally important that the payroll department keeps organized records of the bank details used to transfer electronic payments. Any loss or incorrect transmission of these details will have consequences for the employee, the least of them being a delay in receiving his or her salary in any given month. This delay will lead to an inquiry from the employee, a lot of unscheduled work, and a potential financial penalty for the company for the privilege of making an emergency payment. Multiply this by a factor of 10 or more and you can see how damaging it can be for a company to have poor record-keeping.
If the details are not securely transmitted, they can fall into the wrong hands, and the consequences for the employee are vastly worse, as enterprising criminals can make use of these details to empty the person's account. Money in general and getting paid for the work performed in particular are extremely important matters for anyone. The least that an employee expects from an employer is to be paid on time, securely, and correctly. For this reason, a finely tuned record-keeping system is vital in any company.
The company also will need to keep duplicate records in a secure backup system. At any given time, the company can receive a request for access to the information held. The importance of these records is absolute. In times past, a company's payroll staff would keep all records by hand, with a different ledger for different figures, such as additions, deductions, and any special circumstances for the worker. It required painstaking attention to detail and a lot of manual work.
Now that a lot of this work is done by computer software packages, the days of adding and subtracting columns of figures may be all but gone, but the keeping of records is no less important. No computer system is totally infallible, and even the more reliable ones are still at the mercy of the people operating them. Thus, having on hand a filing system detailing who got paid, how much was paid, when the payment was sent, and why it was that amount is vital. Not only that, but it must be retrospective. For tax purposes, payroll departments keep records for at least three years; but given the requests they habitually receive for further information, there are many companies that hold records for a lot longer. The average seems to be between seven and 10 years, but with no statute of limitations on how long records can be held, it is not unheard of for organizations to keep such records going back over 20 years.
