Payroll: Mission-critical or a throw-away admin task?

Riddle me this: What responsibility is sometimes handled by senior finance and other times by entry-level HR? 

What function manages a budget of millions but often gets assigned to the person with the lowest hourly rate? 

What responsibility might make a senior finance leader spend hours on hold?

What creates biweekly legal exposure but is treated like data entry?

Answer: Payroll.

Payroll is too operationally complex for junior HR and too time-consuming for senior Finance. Yet most companies assign it to one or the other, either by default or desperation.

It's a role that requires the mind of a legal analyst, an engineer, and an accountant, yet it lives in a function built for soft skills.

Finance leaders bring technical and analytical skill, but rarely the HR or compliance instincts. Every time they get pulled into a a garnishment notice or a deduction error, it siphons attention from higher-leverage priorities. That context switching is expensive.

Most HR pros didn't come up through finance or systems. They are promoted for people leadership, influence, coaching, and communication. Not the operational rigor it takes to debug integrations, manage multi-state tax profiles, or negotiate with insurance companies. So payroll becomes the hot potato handed to the person least likely to be promoted.

Broken payroll becomes background noise. People assume it just comes with the territory.

It doesn't.

But fixing it means putting a high-skill operator in charge. One with cross-functional depth and systems fluency. One who sees payroll as infrastructure.

Hi. I'm Claire.

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