Payroll professionals facing greater pressure from heavy workloads, staffing issues

Stress and burnout are increasingly featuring for those working in payroll, with many looking for alternative roles, warns the co-founder of KeyPay.

The general manager of payroll at Employment Hero, Phil Bernie, has warned that finding qualified and experienced payroll professionals will continue to be a challenge again this financial year, with the industry facing staff shortages and increased workloads.

Research from the Australian Payroll Association last year indicated that around 31.2 per cent of payroll professionals planned to change jobs over 12 months.

“That’s a huge trend that we’re seeing. Finding qualified and experienced people to deal with payroll is becoming more difficult,” Bernie said.

Bernie said that many payroll professionals are looking to leave their current roles or leave the industry altogether due to stress and burnout.

Payroll professionals are also dealing with increased workloads, with some businesses cutting down on the amount of outsourced services they used previously for things like payroll audits or salary audits due to economic pressures, he said.

“That means all those services are now being done in-house,” he said.

They are also facing increased audit risk, with the government focusing greater attention on ensuring that employees are being paid the correct amounts.

“That creates an additional burden on top of the huge workload that both SMEs and payroll professionals have,” Bernie said.

Payroll teams are also dealing with an ongoing legislative burden every year, which creates a challenging environment.

“Keeping on top of all these changes can increase the cost of payroll and also the risk of creating errors,” he said.

“They’re not trying to do the wrong thing, but when all these pressures combine, it increases the risk of errors over time, and that’s what payroll professionals are struggling with,” he said.

Bernie said that while it will take time to attract professionals to the industry to address some of the skills shortages, the industry also needs to work on improving the efficiency of processes to reduce some of the burden on professionals.

“There are still a large amount of manual checks that payroll professionals are required to do to check for errors, manual uploads and things still being sent via spreadsheet,” said Bernie.

“There are still a lot of inefficiencies within the industry, and that’s not because people want to use these bad practices; there’s just under-investment in areas like technology within businesses. It’s one of the last areas to get upgraded from a systems perspective.”

Business leaders can sometimes be reticent to changing payroll systems, he said.

“So we need to be looking at how we can get additional people into the industry and into these roles but also how we can improve our processes and technology to be able to get more efficiency and productivity out of payroll processes,” said Bernie.