BRIAN SPARLING Payroll manager JD Wetherspoon plc
MONDAY
Monday is one of our busiest days in the JD Wetherspoon payroll department: we pay our associates (those people working in our pubs excluding management) weekly on a Friday based on hours worked in the preceding week. We import our time and attendance data (T&A) from our 900 pubs first thing on a Monday morning so things can be very hectic as we call the pubs that haven’t closed their timesheets and wait for the information to import into our payroll system.
I use this time in the morning to have a weekly catch up with my management team to discuss the week ahead, tasks that need completed this week, any people issues that we may have and anything else affecting the payroll this week. In the afternoon, the whole finance team has a quick meeting for ten minutes to update everyone on what is happening in the business this week. I give a quick update on the information that has been sent to our pubs this week – we need to make sure our cappuccinos have a 1/3rd tight and polished foam on the top of them!
TUESDAY
Today brings a business process review with our chief executive officer and heads of department. As a company, we are looking to streamline everything we do to create efficiencies across the board. Our broad objective is to ensure that all our 32,000 employees are paid the correct amounts at the correct time – sometimes more difficult than it should be. We are upgrading our T&A system to help our pubs manage their hours in the most efficient way and saving the pub managers approximately three hours a week administration work and hopefully reducing the 1,300 emails a week that come into my team!
48 PayrollProfessional
Tuesday afternoon I head out on the road and visit some of our pubs on CQSMA (cleanliness, quality, service, maintenance and atmosphere) visits. These are internal quality control checks on our pubs to ensure that they are meeting all of the required standards expected in all aspects of our business. As I have the car today, I’m checking that those cappuccinos have the required milky head and served correctly! Feedback is given directly to the pub manager after each visit with a full report submitted online. Our pubs are guaranteed a minimum number of visits each month, with the scores impacting on their bonus payments, so it’s important that standards are met.
WEDNESDAY
Wednesday is spent mostly working with our internal auditors who are currently auditing our pension systems. We’ve been running our auto-enrolment pension scheme for almost a year now and the audit is well overdue. I also need to sign off and approve the Bacs payment for our weekly payroll – the team have a huge sigh of relief and can relax for about two hours whilst we run the real time information processes and terminate the payroll. Then it all starts again!
THURSDAY
Today is a day chock full of meetings, mostly on project related activity. Wetherspoons are opening pubs in the Republic of Ireland for the first time in 2014, so there is a lot of activity on all fronts to make this happen. We are running the payroll in-house so are feverishly testing the payroll module to ensure that we can pay the employees accurately and at the right time. We need to learn all the differences between running
a UK and Republic of Ireland payroll including different tax and social insurance calculations. Seems straightforward enough at the moment, but I am sure that there are complexities that we’ve not yet thought of! Payroll sits within the finance department
at Wetherspoons, but I sit in on the human resources (HR) strategy meeting in the afternoon. Wetherspoons have a scheme called ‘Tell Tim’ where any employee can submit a question / idea / suggestion to our chairman (Tim Martin). Any HR or payroll related Tell Tims are debated at the meeting with an appropriate response then sent back to the employee. Other items up for discussion this week are our uniform policy, recruitment adverts and an update on our company data cleansing. The team print off the P45 forms for our weekly leavers. We can have anywhere between 300 and 500 leavers a week so the printing, folding and labelling of the forms can take a few hours of very laborious work.
FRIDAY
Feels like it’s the end of a very long week, but at least it’s now Friday. Today begins with a meeting with our IT team to look at the release notes for the next version of our payroll software. We need to agree a vigorous testing schedule to ensure that all will go smoothly when we take the upgrade. With several releases of our software a year, the testing cycle seems never ending, but is essential to ensure that we keep up to date. I have my weekly one to one with my manager on Friday afternoon. We discuss the week’s payroll and any issuing arising from it, how the projects are progressing and anything else that is happening at the moment. It’s always good to end up the week with a review of how things have gone, what could have been done better and a look forward to next week.
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a week in the life of...
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