What happens to payroll when the one person who knows it all is gone?

Can your payroll staff take time off without bringing payroll with them? No laptop in the suitcase, or checking emails from the beach. No “just call me if you need anything.”

Vacation is actually the easy scenario. It’s planned. What if they get sick? What if they’re suddenly unavailable? What if they quit?

Could someone else step in and confidently run payroll? Not just follow the processing steps, but know the exceptions, the workarounds, the reconciliations, the deadlines, and all those little pieces of institutional knowledge that somehow never made it into the SOP.

When critical payroll knowledge lives with one person or in that person’s mind, you don’t just have a staffing concern. You have risk.