News

Unlike other functions such as accounting, HR and bookkeeping, there have never been any formal qualifications for payroll. I expect you would be unlikely to visit a health professional that didn’t have the appropriate qualifications, nor would you expect a tradesperson to do a good [...]
Read More

Meet Lisa Bell Graduated: August 2014, Diploma of Payroll Management Lisa is currently a Payroll Assistant at Macquarie Generation. She started there six years ago as a trainee. On the qualification Macquarie Generation encourages and supports further learning and personal [...]
Read More

Payroll can be part of the finance function or might be part of the human resources function in a business.  But the reality is that it’s a specialist set of knowledge and skills that is unique to the payroll function and often underestimated. Here’s some tips for when you next [...]
Read More

A person can claim to have 20 years experience and of course, it sounds impressive.  But is 20 years experience the same as one years experience, repeated 20 times? When recruiting for payroll professionals, employers can ask candidates about payroll courses they may have completed or [...]
Read More

As I’m always saying, good payroll professionals are very hard to find.  Because there is no education requirement for the payroll industry with the first nationally accredited payroll qualifications only launched earlier this year, it is difficult to ascertain who are the best people [...]
Read More

Derek Bok, a US educator and lawyer once famously said “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” How true this is in payroll.  With fines for non compliance from multiple agencies, not being across payroll regulation, legislation and processes can be an expensive [...]
Read More

Although it’s impossible to accurately quantify, payroll fraud is more common than you might think. With most cases remaining unprosecuted, due to the minimal chance of recovering the funds, the fraud is often not reported in the press and is managed by internal HR processes. So [...]
Read More

Perth based Melissa Van Welie who is responsible for a 350 employee payroll at Force Equipment, has become the first qualified payroll professional in Australia after completing the nationally accredited Certificate IV in Payroll Administration. I always said that I would hand deliver [...]
Read More

It’s always the most fascinating time of year for us at Australian Payroll Association, analysing the outcomes of our annual Payroll Benchmarking Report. What’s astonishing in the 2014 study is the differential between the average costs of a payroll operation and those of the top [...]
Read More

You know a payroll operation is doing a good job when the phones don’t ring. Conversely, if a pay office is getting a significant amount of calls or emails following a payroll day, perhaps this is an indication as to the inefficiencies, errors or other problems in the payroll process. [...]
Read More