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RED SAGSkills
hardPayroll Specialist interview question

On pay day morning, the payroll system goes down before the bank file is generated. What do you do?

What the interviewer wants to hear

  • Assess the problem and timeline with IT or the vendor
  • Inform management and agree a contingency
  • Use last approved register or prior month data with controls for an emergency file
  • Communicate to employees if pay is delayed
  • Reconcile and correct after recovery; review continuity plan

Model answer

I would first contact IT or the vendor to understand the problem and the expected fix time, and tell my manager and finance immediately. If the system will be back within the bank cut-off, we wait and run as normal. If not, I would use the contingency plan: if the approved payroll register was exported before the outage, I can prepare the bank file from it, with a second person checking totals and record counts and the usual approvers signing off. If no approved output exists, one option is to pay last month net pay as an advance, with approval, and settle differences later. If salaries will be late, we tell employees early and clearly. After recovery I would reconcile the emergency payment with the system run, correct any differences in the next cycle, and review our continuity plan, such as exporting registers as soon as they are approved.

Can you answer it under time pressure?

Take a timed hard round and get scored on every answer.

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