Angela Pronchuk talks about her career as a payroll professional
Payroll is more than just a job for Angela Pronchuk. It is a career that she relishes.
"I have a lot of passion for payroll," says Pronchuk, the assistant manager, payroll and benefits at GWL Realty Advisors in Winnipeg. "I am so passionate about making sure the pay is accurate all the time and that we are keeping on top of the constant change and making sure people are aware of what is coming because I understand how every error could impact someone’s livelihood."
Pronchuk has been in her current role since 2009. She says she fell into payroll at another company after working in accounts payable and accounting there.
"The entire payroll department quit in 2001 and that’s how I ended up in payroll. I was moved into payroll to clean up the GLs (general ledgers) and help with the payroll accounting," she says.
"Then they hired a new manager and some new processors and from that point, I started dabbling in the payroll and learning how it works. And it seemed to be more interesting to me than accounting was at the time. I had sort of fallen into that accounting role and I just went with it and it was okay, but when I started getting into payroll, I really, really enjoyed it."
One of the things Pronchuk says she loves about payroll is there is continual learning.
"And depending on what type of business you are in and what portion of the legislation that you are going to be using, there are always little exceptions that you have to know and understand."
In her current role, Pronchuk is responsible for the payroll for close to 700 employees across Canada, including in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec. She is also in charge of payroll for seven employees in the United States.
She says she enjoys working with a multi-jurisdictional payroll. "Everybody’s legislation is slightly different. At times, it is challenging, but it is always interesting."
When Pronchuk started working with U.S. payroll, she had to become familiar with the rules. "There is a lot the same, but not necessarily the same terminology," she says.
"Finding things like, for example, that taxable benefits are not called taxable benefits in the States. They call it fringe benefits. You are searching for taxable benefits, but nothing is coming up because the term is fringe benefits. It is very interesting."
Over the past year, Pronchuk was busy helping switch the company’s payroll cycle from semi-monthly to biweekly.
"Our parent company, Great-West Life went biweekly," she says. "Some of our employees on the Reality Advisor side actually exist on the Great-West Life payroll and so we didn’t want pay stubs coming in on different days to the same branch all the time. Helping them (the employees) to understand which payroll they are actually on is enough of a challenge, so we needed to stay in sync with what the parent company was doing."
She says the process took a lot of time and planning and required her to work in the back-end of the company’s payroll system to ensure the correct coding changes were made for the move. She says previous experience working in data management helped her understand the inner workings of the company’s Ceridian payroll system.
"We started looking at that back-end stuff really early and getting all of that set up so that we wouldn’t have that issue come year end."
Explaining the change to employees was another vital part of successfully making the switch, Pronchuk says. "Communication was huge in this change. It was about 50 per cent of the project."
The payroll department attached information to pay stubs, sent out e-mails and posted on the company’s internal website where employees could review questions and answers.
Payroll made sure documents explaining the change were translated into both French and Spanish for French-speaking employees in Quebec and Spanish-speaking workers in Texas.
In addition, Pronchuk says she directly communicated with staff through online information sessions.
"Because of how our companies are situated — we own buildings all over the place with one or two staff here, one or two staff there — we couldn’t have group meetings where we could explain the whole thing to employees sitting in a room all at once. Instead, I built a webinar that people could sign up for. We had a half-hour session on several different days where they could log in and see the slides and I was live talking to them, so that they could ask any questions they had," she says.
For workers on night shifts who could not attend the live webinars, Pronchuk created a pre-recorded session. "If they had any questions after, they could follow up with their manager who could follow up with me."
Pronchuk says she put so much effort into communication because it was important to help employees understand the change. "We are changing their entire livelihood. They are now going to have to reschedule how they are paid, reschedule how (money is) coming out of their bank account, how that is going to impact their lifestyle."
When it came time for the switchover this past January, Pronchuk says she was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly it went. She says payroll staff had cleared their calendars and were waiting for calls from employees with questions or concerns.
"By noon on D-Day, as I like to call it, we did not have one phone call or e-mail. I called our Corporate Resources department and asked them if they had any concerns or questions from anybody and they said, ‘No. Why?’ And I said, ‘We went live today. Today was their first pay cheque.’ ‘Oh yeah,’ they said. ‘Good job.’ We went and celebrated after that."
At the same time Pronchuk and her team were implementing the new pay cycle, they had to deal with a new acquisition the company had made and carry out normal year-end functions. Pronchuk says proper planning and good teamwork helped them cope with the challenges.
"I have a really good team. Keeping them involved and myself involved in what was coming, what the next tasks were. A good task listing is where we started, brainstorming on everything, on everyone’s thoughts, on what needed to be looked at, be changed, (then) assigning the duties appropriately based on skill, (and) making sure that the staff is appropriately assigned the tasks that are upcoming."
Pronchuk says one of the biggest challenges in payroll is staying on top of everything happening in the profession. She tries to read as much payroll news as she can, but says with her busy job there is not always time to digest all the information from different payroll sources.
Pronchuk says one thing she does to keep abreast of the big changes is to attend the Canadian Payroll Association’s year-end legislation updates. "It is so helpful because you are then removing yourself from all the other distractions (at work) and you can focus on just that emerging change to make sure that you are at least on top of it annually if not right away."
To be successful in payroll, Pronchuk says passion and dedication are fundamental, as is being comfortable with change. "If you are the kind of person who doesn’t like change and that’s not interesting to you, then it probably isn’t the profession for you because you have to always be able to make the change, understand the change, implement the change and be okay with it constantly changing."
While Pronchuk did not start out her working life planning to be a payroll professional, she says she is happy she followed that path.
"I just fell into it like most of the people I know in payroll. There are not very many people out there that I’ve actually come across who say, ‘Oh yeah, I actually went and took courses because I wanted to be a payroll professional,’" she says.
"I definitely hear more so that somebody quit or they needed somebody in that department, so they moved them along into there and closed their eyes and ran away and hoped everything would be OK."
She says she is pleased employers are now seeing it as a profession and people are setting out in their careers to be payroll professionals.
"You used to look at ads and they would say they needed a payroll processor, a few duties they needed to do and whatnot, nothing ever about needing the education or the skills behind that role. Now if you look at ads from employers, you are seeing more the actual PCP (the association’s Payroll Compliance Practitioner) or CPM (Certified Payroll Manager) noted in the ad. It is huge. It makes me feel proud to be in this profession."
