Senior Payroll Practitioner
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Manchester Store Support Centre and Home, Manchester, M4 3AL
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: People
Closing date: 03 September 2026
Requisition ID: 400076697
Why join us
Joining the Payroll Operations team at Sainsbury's offers the opportunity to play a crucial role in ensuring the accurate and timely production of payroll services across the organisation. As a Senior Payroll Practitioner, you will be part of a dynamic team dedicated to delivering high-quality service to colleagues throughout Sainsbury's, including retail, store support centres, and distribution. With a focus on professionalism and excellence, this role provides a platform for continuous learning and development, where you can contribute to maintaining compliance, building strong relationships, and making a real impact on the payroll operations of a multi-channel, multi-brand business.
What you'll do
As a Senior Payroll Practitioner at Sainsbury's, you will be an integral part of the Payroll Operations team, ensuring the accurate and timely production and administration of payroll services across the organisation. Your responsibilities will include validating and reviewing remote input to the payroll system, responding to error messages, preparing data uploads, inputting payroll-related data, undertaking pay corrections, and providing expert support to the AskHR team for effective handling of pay queries. Additionally, you will be expected to maintain compliance with statutory requirements, company policies, and data protection regulations, while building strong relationships with HR Operations teams and constantly seeking ways to improve processes and service delivery. Your success in this role will be measured by the quality and timeliness of payroll data input, adherence to policies and procedures, maintenance of data confidentiality, and adherence to service level agreements to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
Who you are
As a Senior Payroll Practitioner at Sainsbury's, you are a dedicated professional with a thorough understanding of payroll service delivery, statutory compliance, and company policies. With expertise in accurately processing payroll data and ensuring adherence to authorisation procedures, you excel in maintaining high standards of service delivery and customer satisfaction. Your ability to build strong relationships with HR Operations teams, drive process improvements, and uphold data confidentiality demonstrates your commitment to excellence in payroll administration and continuous improvement within a dynamic and collaborative environment.
Essential Criteria
Demonstrable experience of payroll administration and payroll processing, including inputting, validating or reviewing payroll data accurately and in line with processing deadlines.
Proven ability to identify, investigate and resolve payroll errors, warnings or incomplete data, escalating issues appropriately where required.
Working knowledge of statutory payroll requirements and deductions, such as tax codes, student loans, court orders, attachment of earnings or other regulatory payroll inputs.
Experience using payroll, HR or workforce management systems, alongside Excel or similar tools, to process uploads, data entry or payroll-related calculations.
Demonstrable understanding of payroll controls, authorisation processes and data protection requirements, including maintaining colleague confidentiality and adhering to policy and procedure
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Please note, due to the volume of applications we receive, our roles may close early.
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.
Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
