Keeping Auckland Museum’s complex payroll moving

• Auckland Museum manages a diverse and highly mobile workforce, with employees moving between permanent and casual roles and some working multiple roles at the same time.  
  

• Datapay supports payroll processing and automation, while Auckland Museum retains responsibility for oversight, validation and approval.  
  

• A decade-long relationship with Datacom gives the Museum access to local payroll expertise, supporting major payroll changes and complex New Zealand payroll requirements. 

Walk through Auckland Museum on any given day and you will pass the people who keep it running: visitor hosts guiding the public, curators, researchers, display technicians, events staff preparing the rooftop event centre, and students picking up casual shifts between lectures. 

Janet Varcoe has led the payroll function at Auckland Museum for nearly a decade, and she is the first to say she does not do it alone. 

“I am supported by our People and Organisation team, whose work is integral to my role. I have also had the support of the Datacom consultants, and without them life would have been a bit harder. It has been very valuable having their expertise as backup.” 

On paper, Museum payroll might sound straightforward but in practice, it has a number of different complexities. 

The Museum runs almost everything in-house, from marketing to exhibition builds, so the workforce spans salaried professionals, casuals and everything in between. People move constantly. A visitor host studying for a degree might shift into a permanent role in another team. A permanent staff member might pick up a second casual role for a major event. 

Many staff hold more than one role at once, each needing its own pay components, correctly costed and linked through to the Museum's time and attendance system. 

“We have quite a lot of movement within the Museum,” says Varcoe. “Some of our staff do more than one role, so that has been challenging.”  

For a sole-charge payroll professional, that creates considerable complexity. The Museum uses Datapay as a managed service, with Datacom’s team handling day-to-day processing while Varcoe retains responsibility for oversight, validation and approval. 

"It's probably the most automated system I've used over the years. All of those background calculations happen without me having to do them myself. And I don't think I could have handled it all by myself otherwise."

Varcoe's decade at the Museum has included several significant payroll projects. 

Six months into her role, the Museum's senior leadership decided to consolidate three separate payrolls, weekly, fortnightly and monthly, into a single fortnightly cycle. It meant moving every employee onto a new pay frequency and bringing the whole organisation through the change. 

"We worked through all of the change issues with our staff, and it worked really smoothly when we did it." 

Since then, the Museum has restructured its cost centres, migrated its general ledger from one provider to another, and built role-by-role cost centre allocation into timesheets so labour can be costed accurately against individual events and projects. 

When the Museum needed pay components configured for staff holding multiple casual roles, Datacom worked alongside the Museum and its time and attendance provider to put the required setup in place. 

For Varcoe, the relationship with the people supporting the Museum's payroll is an important part of how the service works. 

She is in contact with her Datacom consultant almost daily, and more often during pay processing. She knows exactly who is at the other end. Her current consultant replaced the previous one, who had run the Museum’s payroll before becoming a team lead at Datapay, and they still catch up at industry conferences. 

"If you don't have a good rapport with someone, it's harder to get the information you want. It definitely makes a difference." 

That relationship becomes particularly useful when the questions are complex. Working through the Museum’s Holidays Act remediation gave Varcoe a deeper understanding of what sits behind payroll calculations. Access to local payroll expertise also gives her another perspective when working through less straightforward scenarios, including annual leave anomalies.  

"The questions I ask are usually pretty well answered." 

A decade in, one of the biggest changes Varcoe has seen is how payroll is valued within the Museum. 

“Payroll is becoming more visible. We used to be in the background, more of an afterthought. That is definitely changing. I get included in more meetings now. Before, it was, ‘Can you do this?’ Now I am brought in before things get to that point.” 

Varcoe is now looking at how payroll data can provide greater insight for the organisation. She is building reporting to help senior leadership understand where labour costs sit and how teams are operating. She is also watching the introduction of AI into Datapay with interest. 

"If we can provide better information to our senior leadership, then that's all good. That's what we want."  

Nearly 10 years into the relationship, Datapay continues to support the Museum’s payroll function as its workforce and requirements evolve, giving Varcoe automation for day-to-day processing and access to payroll expertise when she needs it.