A payroll clerk is a type of clerk who works in a company’s financial department, providing clerk services for that company’s employee salaries and other aspects of their payrolls. The payroll clerk would organize files related to salaries, categorize them in specific structures, as well as provide access to files to their superiors on demand. Additionally, a payroll clerk may be required to perform some basic maintenance on the company’s payroll records, especially when they’re stored on an electronic carrier.
Becoming a payroll clerk doesn’t require a high degree of education, and a high school diploma is enough in most cases. The job requires speedy work, the ability to concentrate on several tasks simultaneously, as well as being neat and organized when it comes to working with large amounts of information. Payroll clerks must be especially little prone to mistakes, as their job is of a sensitive nature and affects a matter that can harm a company’s reputation quite seriously in case of a serious mistake.
The average annual salary of a payroll clerk is between $25,000 – $37,000, and the job doesn’t have much to offer in terms of benefits and other bonuses attached to it. The base salary is pretty much the entire pay in most cases, and many employers are actively looking for ways to decrease their payroll clerks’ salaries even further, which can serve to make the job a very unattractive choice and definitely not a bright career option. It does have some small perks though, which can somewhat compensate for its downsides.