There's nothing like a pay!
Your pay ends up in your account every fortnight - but how, and who does it?
Pictured from left to right: Lyn Cousins, Data Analyst; Ingrid Bonner, Superannuation Officer; Marie Murnain, Payroll Coordinator; Barbara Brajlih, Remuneration Officer; Lisa Manton, Data Officer; David Pleasance, Manager Remuneration and Benefits. (Not pictured: Trish Falk, Payroll Officer; and Wendy Gardner, Superannuation Officer - Retiring)
David Pleasance, Manager of the Remuneration and Benefits team in Human Resource Services, takes us on a UoN Quick Tour and lets us in on some fascinating details about the process.
We have only seven staff on our team. Wendy Gardner and Ingrid Bonner look after superannuation issues, Marie Murnain and Trisha Falk run the pays, and Lynn Cousins and Lisa Manton make sure the employee data is updated and accurate. When benchmarked against other universities, our team is quite small.
We work all of the year. Payrolls need to be run regardless of the time of year. We were in the office on New Year's Day 2012 because a pay was due to go out!
Our highest load times are at the beginning of each semester and towards the end of the financial year. We need to produce payment summaries for every staff member, casual or otherwise, and we do this without any extra staff.
We produce over 9,000 Payment Summaries each year and pay over 3,500 people a fortnight in semester time. In addition, we pay approximately 1000 scholarship recipients, over 2,500 Practicum Teachers (in partnership with the Professional Education Unit) and over 200 exam supervisors. We also maintain all details of over1200 Conjoint appointments in Alesco
Our gross fortnightly pay is $12 million. $2.5 million of this is in tax, and $1.5 million in superannuation. In a year, the University pays staff an incredible $300 million gross!
We run the payrolls for UoN Services and Gradschool.com as well as the University itself.
We've had a great uptake of Paid Parental Leave since it began in November 2011. We've paid 40 staff a total of $284,000.
HRonline has changed the way we work. HRonline was introduced in 2004. Previously, we had 2 staff manually keying in timesheets, which was a huge load.
We need to constantly stay on top of changes in legislation and tax scales. We receive an email from the Tax Office each week that keeps us informed.
No payroll has ever failed. Each pay has always gone through on time on our side. On occasion financial institutions have had their own processing issues which have affected the availability of pay for some staff members, but we've always been able to send pays through (fingers crossed!).
Wendy is retiring at the end of June. Wendy has been with us for 23 years. She started around the time of amalgamation with Hunter Institute of Higher Education in 1989. She took up the role as Superannuation Officer in 2007 and has done a magnificent job keeping all our Superannuation records up to date. Her hard work has enabled the University to be consistently ranked as one of the top performers against UniSuper's Performance Benchmarking Measures. Well done Wendy - we will miss you!!
It is now time for some team changes. It's welcome to a new team member - Barbara Brajlih. Barb has an extensive payroll and Human Resource Systems experience and joins the team as Remuneration Officer, with Ingrid Bonner moving into the Superannuation Officer role.
In the Loop would like to thank the Remuneration and Benefits Team for helping us understand the important work they do. If you would like your team featured in UoN Quick Tour, email IntheLoop@newcastle.edu.au
