There are four key benchmarks for the cost of payroll:

• Cost per Employee
• Cost per Payment
• Payments per Employee
• Employees/Payroll staff FTE.

All four are important since an authority paying all staff monthly should have a lower cost per employee, but is likely to show a higher cost per payment (payslip). Members can select comparisons with other authorities having a similar mix of employees and the club also provides an analysis of cost per ‘equivalent monthly’ employee, which attaches different weights to weekly paid, monthly paid and pensioners. A further analysis takes into account positive and negative input into the payroll system.

The other complication with benchmarking payroll is to ensure that the comparisons are reasonably ‘like-for-like’. For this purpose the club has developed a detailed definition of what does and does not count as core payroll work. Members are then asked to deduct the cost of non-core work, and to add in their best estimate of the cost of core work undertaken in other departments – data input being the main example.