By BJ Boyer | Senior Consultant, Australian Payroll Association
Before moving into payroll management, I spent years working as an accountant. Like most accountants, I trusted spreadsheets. They gave me visibility, control and flexibility. If something didn’t balance, I could trace it back to the source and if something looked off, I could work through the numbers until it made sense.
When I moved into payroll, I quickly realised something: payroll teams rely on spreadsheets for the same reasons accountants do control, reconciliation and comfort.
But payroll is different.
Payroll is accounting in motion live data moving between time systems, HR platforms, superannuation funds, banks and the general ledger. Spreadsheets are powerful tools, but they weren’t designed for dynamic, system driven environments.
Over time, I’ve come to realise that productivity in payroll doesn’t come from building better spreadsheets. It comes from configuring systems properly in the first place.
Spreadsheets are incredibly flexible. They allow adjustments, scenario testing and manual reconciliation. But that flexibility is also their weakness.
Manual handling introduces risk:
Many payroll teams build complex spreadsheet workbooks to bridge gaps between systems exporting reports, manipulating data, reformatting files, then uploading them somewhere else.
In one organisation I worked with, payroll relied on multiple linked spreadsheets to produce the general ledger journals. Every pay run involved exporting data, adjusting formulas and manually reformatting files before upload. It worked until someone changed a formula or made a change in payroll. That was the moment I realised the issue wasn’t the system but how we had designed it.
As an accountant, I was trained to reconcile after the fact. But in payroll, the real leverage comes from getting the design right at the start.
When payroll is properly connected to time and attendance, HR and finance systems, it stops being a series of manual processes. Journals flow automatically into finance. Employee data moves between platforms without task repetition and the number of end-of-process fixes drops significantly. It’s not about doing more. It’s about getting the structure right from the beginning.