What happens to pay when the person responsible is not there?
Short answer: When the person responsible for payroll is away, pay must still be correct and paid on time. That requires a written plan with fixed deadlines, access to the systems, and a contact person who can approve and run the payroll.
Monday morning, and pay must be ready for payment on Friday. The person who normally handles it – often one specific person, often the same one for years – calls in sick. Not a holiday announced weeks in advance. Just a flu that arrives the way it usually does: without asking whether it is convenient.
That is the moment it becomes clear whether a company has a payroll administration, or just has one employee who knows how to do it.
Because pay does not wait. Reporting to SKAT via eIndkomst must happen every month, regardless of who is in the office. Holiday pay must be calculated and reported to FerieKonto on time. If an employee has applied for parental leave, the deadline for applying for reimbursement runs, whether anyone has an overview of it or not. None of these deadlines move because someone in the house is ill.
What typically goes wrong is not the payroll run itself – most people can work out how to start it, at least roughly. It is everything around it: which agreements have been made with the individual employee about supplements and exceptions? Where in the system is the login for the pension provider? Who has remembered that one particular employee must have reimbursement applied for this month? That kind of thing is rarely written down anywhere – it lives in the head of the person who usually does it. And a head cannot log in when it has a fever.
The consequences seldom arrive immediately. They arrive when a reporting is forgotten and SKAT sends a demand for back payment. When an employee discovers two months later that holiday pay was never correctly reported. When a parental leave reimbursement with a deadline was not applied for, because nobody else knew it had to be.
This is not an argument for outsourcing payroll because you cannot manage it. Most people who handle payroll in smaller companies are good at it. It is an argument that one person is rarely an administration – it is a vulnerability that does not show itself until the day things go wrong.
At Lønkontoret the answer is not more complicated than this: there is always more than one pair of eyes on your payroll. If an employee at our office is ill, the payroll still runs, because no single person is the only one who knows your setup. You do not lose the overview just because one person is away for a week.
If you are unsure what it looks like at your company: ask yourself whether the payroll could run correctly if the person who normally does it were away for three weeks tomorrow. If the answer is no, it is not a problem that will solve itself.
How to test the plan
A plan that has never been tested is rarely good enough. Choose one payroll run a year when the person responsible is absent, and let someone else carry it out according to the plan. Note where they get stuck, which information is missing, and what took the longest. That gives the best list of what the plan needs to be corrected for.
What the employees need to know
Employees should know who to contact if they have questions about pay, and when they can expect their pay. It is a small detail, but it decides whether an absence becomes a problem for them or not. Write a short message that can be sent out when responsibility changes, so questions do not get left hanging.
Responsibility and approval
It is important to distinguish between the person who prepares the payroll run and the person who approves it. In small companies it is often the same person, and that is a vulnerable point. When two people share the tasks, errors are more often caught, and there is a natural check before money is paid out.
Frequently asked questions
Who may approve the payroll run?
It should be a person with competence and responsibility in the company, typically management or a designated manager. The approval should be documented, so it is clear who approved the pay in each month.
How often should the plan be updated?
At least once a year, and always when there are changes to collective agreements, staff or systems.
Can pay be paid out if the person responsible is away?
Yes, if there is a plan, a person with access and an approver. If one of those three things is missing, the risk of delay and errors is high.
What happens to reporting to SKAT if the payroll run is delayed?
Reporting to eIndkomst must, as a general rule, be sent no later than the payment day. The payroll run and the reporting must therefore be planned together.