Ben Renshaw
National Leader, Payroll Advisory
Partner, People Advisory, Global Expatriate Services & Employment Taxes
Partner, People Advisory, Global Expatriate Services & Employment Taxes
The constantly changing and complex payroll environment in Australia can leave organisations feeling overwhelmed and unsure as to where to start. Understanding and contextualising your payroll landscape can provide a holistic overview of how your organisation's payroll is performing.
Understanding the risks, controls and improvement opportunities can benefit an organisation, improving efficiency and effectiveness while ensuring compliance with statutory laws and regulations.
Our Payroll Advisory team helps businesses with their end-to-end payroll function, reviewing payroll risk processes and systems to identify areas of process improvement.
How BDO can help
Our Payroll Advisory team can assist across a range of risk, process, and system services:
- Payroll review: Review payroll processes, risks, controls, systems, and governance structures to assess the efficiency of design and effectiveness of controls to minimise payroll risks to an organisation
- Payroll health-checks: Our team has a four-phase approach to conducting payroll health checks -
- Phase 1: Gain an understanding of key people, processes and technology within the payroll function with a view to assessing areas of risk to the organisation. A detailed examination of the key payroll process is undertaken, mapping out key risks and controls to identify and fix existing gaps. A data profile map is also prepared during this phase to identify areas for focus and improvement.
- Phase 2: Examine systems to determine if set-up is in compliance with the pay instruments, superannuation, and taxation legislation. The configuration of payroll rules in the system is also assessed (i.e. overtime, and the controls and processes to update and maintain the payroll system).
- Phase 3: Transaction test the application of pay for employees to identify any pay anomalies based on time and attendance and employee data. End-to-end sample testing is used to confirm the accuracy of payments to employees.
- Phase 4: All of the phases come together into a payroll improvement plan, creating an achievable plan for correcting errors, uplifting and enhancing the payroll function, and providing initiatives for continuous improvement.
- Payroll data analytics: BDO has a number of tools to assist with data analytics, including more than 100 pre-configured queries. This allows efficient anomaly testing of payroll masterfile data, payment transaction data, time and attendance data, and trend analysis of high risk areas within an organisation's payroll (e.g. overtime and leave balances)
- Continuous payroll monitoring tools, assurance programs and dashboards
- System selection and implementation support: BDO supports clients with their requirements gathering, vendor selection and implementation, including the design, build, testing and roll-out of rostering, time, attendance and payroll solutions.
Contact us to learn how BDO can assist with your difficulties surrounding payroll process and systems.
