Payroll Officer

Positive Employment is currently recruiting for a Payroll Officer for our client, a local government organisation in Kensington. The successful post holder will be responsible for correctly calculating employee gross pay and net pay in accordance with statutory and contractual requirements, ensuring that all permanent and temporary transactions are correctly processed on time, and that all anomalies are investigated and corrected prior to payroll finalisation. Resolve day-to-day payroll enquiries originating from employees, managers, and third parties, in accordance with the agreed timescales, and to ensure that this feeds back into correct payroll transactions. This is initially a 3-month contract with the possibility to extend after that date. Potential to go permanent. This role will be hybrid working.

• Have a good understanding of statutory and contractual requirements relating to the payroll, including PAYE Tax, National Insurance, National Minimum Wage, London Living Wage, Local Government Pension Scheme, Teachers Pension Scheme, Statutory Sick Pay, Statutory Child-Related Pay, contractual sick pay, and contractual child-related pay.
• Work with the Senior Payroll Officers in the accurate and timely production of all payrolls and their outputs throughout the payroll processing cycle.
• Run a range of regular and ad-hoc processes as part of the payroll production cycle, including provisional payslip calculations, and ensure that changes are implemented to underlying employee data as necessary to maintain accuracy of the payroll.
• Perform regular reviews of employee data contributing to payroll calculations (e.g. tax codes, NI categories, pension scheme memberships) to ensure that all data sets will flow through to accurate payroll calculations for all employees.
• Perform the regular daily processes for ensuring that all payroll data for new starters is correctly input into Oracle, for example payment method, bank details, tax code, NI category, pension scheme membership, pay elements, etc.
• Work with the Recruitment Team and Organisation Structure Team to ensure that starters, movers, and leavers are correctly actioned for payroll purposes, and that any anomalies affecting the payroll are identified and corrected prior to payroll finalisation.
• Update master data based on changed circumstances of the employee, such as changes to National Insurance (NI) category, receipt of P45 data for new starters, etc.
• Participate in testing of payroll-related updates to software systems, record outcomes of testing, and re-test where appropriate, providing updates and raising any concerns to the Senior Payroll Officer or Payroll Manager as required.

• An understanding of payroll processes, taking into account statutory and non-statutory requirements, and to provide advice and guidance to employees on how their pay is calculated.
• A good understanding of the components of an employee’s pay and of the range of issues that can impact on an employee’s gross and net pay.
• Previous experience working with payroll systems and understanding of processes and pay data.
• An understanding of pension scheme membership rules and statutory employer pension obligations as they affect payroll production.
• An understanding of employer obligations regarding payroll outputs for the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) and Teachers Pensions (TP).