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Worcestershire County Council Payroll Department: ROCC delivers recommendations for administrative process improvements

Ensuring that employees return expense forms and time sheets to meet a payroll department’s tight deadlines for processing this data is a major headache which many organisations encounter and Worcestershire County Council (WCC) was no different. It needed a solution to automate the business processes in its finance department and called upon ROCC to undertake a consultative project and advise the council the best way forward. The group held several information gathering meetings with the managers concerned to analyse the issues, shortfalls of existing systems and potential for improvement. At the end of this process ROCC presented recommendations which empowered WCC to make far reaching changes.

The council employs over 11,000 staff across all services. The area it wished to streamline was the 4000 travel and subsistence claim forms submitted by staff each month for processing by payroll services.

There were at least nine different paper form types which were hard to use, handwritten and difficult to read and interpret. Deadline for submission of the forms was early in the month. Inevitably, processing bottlenecks occurred from receipt of the claims forms, validation and demands on the sections heads for payment authorisation, through to validation and data entry by the finance department. The latter was a time consuming operation involving eight expense payment databases and multiple payrolls, with complex business rules and, in many cases, it was hard to identify the authoriser’s signature.

ROCC took an approach to the process analysis that was both structured and flexible, starting with a meeting with the council’s project sponsor to establish clear terms of reference and project roles and responsibilities. The next step was to introduce facilitated workshop sessions with key people covering IT and business issues and constraints to ascertain the real problems areas and to look at the current business processes and IT systems. During the consultative period, and in conjunction with WCC’s project sponsor, ROCC defined and mapped the business processes in question.

WCC introduced self-certified travel and subsistence forms, removing from the processing chain validation and authorisation by the section head (unless required). After processing by the finance department the forms with the supporting receipts would be stored locally with regular adhoc audits. Section heads receive a report of expenses charged to their budgets, and have an opportunity to withdraw inappropriate payments.

WCC gained a better understanding of its own business processes enabling the council to become more focused on those elements which added value such as data entry where there is now a better front end in place with expenses processing.