Senior Payroll & Pensions Associate

Our client is looking for a Senior Payroll and pension associate to be part of the team based in Leeds. As one of the UK's leading audit and advisory firms, we offer a lively and stimulating environment where your goal will be to provide high level administrative support to the Payroll Department, working as part of the Finance Operational Excellence Hub (OEH).

This is a varied role that will allow the job holder to cover all the aspects of completing a monthly payroll and administering the pensions contributions, opts outs and payments to providers. The job holder will be responsible for a specified section of the payroll and assist with the overall workload of the existing team.

As part of the Finance team, the Payroll Department is responsible for the regular monthly payment of over 16,500 employees based in the UK.The Payroll department has 13 permanent staff dealing with the payment of employees from all of UK offices.

What will you be doing?

The Senior Payroll & Pension Associate requires significant technical knowledge on payroll and related activities to apply to the following tasks and skills:

• To assume primary responsibility for a specified group of monthly paid staff, ensuring data held within the payroll system is accurate and updated within controlled processes
• Maintaining an awareness of current and future PAYE developments; keeping up to date with changes that directly affect the firm's employees, related enhancements and changes within the payroll software, and other internal and external policy decisions that impact upon an individual's pay and reward
• Liaising with other OEH teams (specifically the Benefit & Pensions Teams) to ensure the timely and accurate flow of data and information to support the payroll team and related processes, whilst maintaining knowledge of their systems and processes that have a link with the payroll process
• To ensure the timely and satisfactory resolution of payroll queries.
• Resolving general queries from employees regarding their monthly payment and tax status
• Investigating complex payroll queries that require expert knowledge of PAYE
• Providing specific payroll calculations for staff with changes to their personal circumstances such as parental leave or flexible working
• Investigating and responding to pension queries, increases and decreases of contributions, changes to entitlements etc.
• Responding to queries from HMRC regarding individual employees and payments made, ensuring compliance with the Data Protection Act
• Working as part of a team to provide a best practice model of payroll; sharing knowledge and working through complex issues and solutions together, sharing routine and ad-hoc tasks across the team, and assisting the Team Leaders when required

What will you need to do it?

• Experience of working within a payroll or pensions role in a large organisation
• A good level of computer literacy, with advanced knowledge of payroll software packages
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Have a high attention to detail and accuracy
• Have the ability to remain calm under pressure to produce work to very tight deadlines
• Have initiative and ability to cope with erratic workloads whilst prioritising their own tasks
• Client service, resilience, task management and initiative are essential
• CIPP Qualification is desirable, but not essential.

Lorien Internal is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.