Is payroll a stressful area to work in?

the payroll department, and the finance department, and receptionist. The payroll was pretty straightforward as the staff and hours were consistent.

Now that depends on the company you work for. I’m not very good at giving straight answers to potentially complex questions.

I worked in the ‘payroll department’ of a small company with only six employees… okay, I was the payroll department, and the finance department, and receptionist. The payroll was pretty straightforward as the staff and hours were consistent. So minimal stress.

Working for a company, take McDonalds for instance, where staff don’t stay long and hours are irregular can be more stressful and requires more focus.

You have to remember that any mistakes you make could have a formidable impact on someone’s life. If you short pay them they may not have savings to pay their bills and feed their families. It’s not something to take lightly.

However it’s not surgery level stressful. Just requires a level of focus and attention to detail. I can only think of two occasions where I have been negatively affected by poor payroll staff but former colleagues worked for an agency who had a reputation for being late payers - you got your money eventually but couldn’t guarantee when that would be.

I was mid twenties when I started a new job, I was expecting to get, let’s say, 500 for my first months pay. Payslip comes in and they had paid me 1500. Okay, time to choose - do I tell them or not? I can’t pretend that I didn’t notice, it’s my first pay from them! It wasn’t that good a job that I may naively think I had a pay rise already! Maybe it’s an honesty test for new employees…. I told them what had happened, they thanked me and solved the problem by not paying me for the next two months…. not a great solution in my opinion - I wasn’t very good at budgeting back then so blew the lot in six weeks and had nothing for the next two months!

The other story only makes sense if you know how the UKs PAYE system works, so I will just quietly fume whilst thinking on it.