Advice needed for improving payroll processes - General - HR in Schools and Academies

6 Advice needed for improving payroll processes

Hello,

I’m seeking advice on improving payroll processes for support staff at our independent school. Currently, HR sets the pay, working weeks, and holiday entitlements, which are then passed on to our Payroll Administrator. The administrator works with annual salary figures only and inputs this into the PASS Finance system to calculate tax, NI, and process salary payments for support staff.

Over the past couple of years our new Head has requested that the Payroll Administrator apply annual uplifts directly to salaries as a Finance department function only. This has led to issues with our payroll data, as we now do not have breakdowns of how support staff pay is made up. I wasn’t here before this uplift process was implemented, but it appears the previous HR Manager created individual annual pay statements each year in Word, manually calculating the details. Upon review, I’ve found these documents to be inconsistent in methods of calculating salaries and holiday allowances and pay (mainly for TTO staff), which means our data is inaccurate, leaving our current payroll system prone to errors.

This has become a challenge, especially when staff request details like their hourly rate or when I need to identify staff requiring pay adjustments due to NLW increases. Without experience in manual payroll systems, I am finding it difficult to determine how this data should be correctly calculated and presented. It does appear Finance have always referred this work back to HR to calculate, so I need to find a solution to this situation.

I’ve explored the possibility of using PASS Finance to handle this data more effectively, but I’ve been informed it would require an additional HR module. Unfortunately, we currently lack the resources and budget for such a project, so a manual solution is necessary for now.

I would greatly appreciate any advice, templates, or guidance on how to approach this process manually, especially as both I, the Payroll Administrator and new Bursar do not have the knowledge or experience to address this in house.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Andrea

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David | 0 Posts

4 days ago

Hi Andrea

My own present rudimentary but for all manner of things very useful knowledge of Excel was rooted in experimentation long ago with trying to use spreadsheets for bespoke HR tasks for about 150 staff who were paid using standalone payroll software. (Recall once trying to produce individual redundancy severance forecasts for the entire workforce that combined and aggregated statutory redundancy calculations and a range of contractual supplements etc - working through all that taught me a lot and would have been a massive job to do manually! )

So, I can only tentatively suggest that spreadsheets etc might be the way to go with this problem. Most organisations already have eg Excel and its eg macro programming capabilities are almost unlimited in the hands of someone that really knows how to drive it. That might be yourself on a learning curve and / or one or more of your colleagues but failing that it may be possible to hire in some help at a reasonable rate to set such things up for you, eg via a student placement can sometimes provide access to considerable expertise.
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Kimberly | 0 Posts

4 days ago

Hi Andrea

I'm not a fan of payroll sitting under finance as they do not know (and/or care enough?) about T&Cs around pay.

The main issue appears to be lack of consistency - everyone involved needs to ensure they are using the same calculation, and everyone needs to be trained and understand the calculation used.

Assuming you have calculated the FTE, surely you would just multiply this by the FTE salary to get the actual salary? You can use spreadsheets to calculate this and send to payroll - you will then have a clear audit trail and also be able to use in a mail merge for pay statements.
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Nina Waters | 0 Posts

4 days ago

In both schools I've worked in recently, I've had to unpick the way that salaries have been calculated, and then create a consistent spreadsheet with all the data. Part of the issue is that few HR and payroll databases (including the one we have) can get their computer brains around term time only work patterns and how that affects one type of contract but not another.

Most people don't think about this kind of thing very much, and finance people (in both schools I've worked in) only really seem to bother about the end payment and not how it's calculated. It's our job to do the rest of the exercise, and make sure that pay is properly structured to some framework that makes sense, and to do this consistently.

But it isn't easy! Very happy to chat offline about it if that would be helpful.

Nina
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Andrea | 0 Posts

2 days ago

In reply to David:
Hi David, thank you for your advice. I suspected spreadsheets were the way to go, but wanted to check I had the correct understanding.
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Andrea | 0 Posts

2 days ago

In reply to Kimberly:
Hi Kimberly, thank you for your advice, and I understand your comment about Finance not fully appreciating the T&Cs of contracts to ensure we are paying our staff correctly and consistently. It seems the way to address this is to have a spreadsheet with agreed calculations between finance and HR which I have already considered. It's the calculations for the TTO staff which are going to present me with a challenge as the spreadsheet calculations need to be formatted in the right way for these contracts.
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Andrea | 0 Posts

2 days ago

In reply to Nina Waters:
Hi Nina, that you for your advice. I would like to create a spreadsheet database of the information we are missing, so a chat would be really helpful. My email is apittam@talbotheath.org. Thank you for your help.
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