Payroll Specialist – Controls & Assurance

Newly created permanent position | $115K + Super + NFP Tax Benefit | 3 Days WFH

About the organisation

A large not-for-profit organisation based in Sydney’s Western Suburbs, this organisation continues to expand its footprint of community support and regional access across NSW and beyond. With an outstanding reputation for care and compassion in its field of expertise, the organisation has recently undergone a significant modernisation and enhancement of its Payroll and HR Systems architecture, designed to improve employee experience and drive greater operational efficiency.

Supported by high-calibre leadership across Payroll Operations, HR Systems and the broader executive team, they are continuing to strengthen the governance, controls and assurance capability supporting one of Australia’s larger and more complex payroll environments.

Reporting to the Payroll & HR Operations Lead, this senior individual contributor role provides independent quality assurance and controls across the end to end payroll lifecycle.

You will be responsible for:

- Performing pre-pay-run validation and quality assurance across payroll outputs
- Reviewing payroll exceptions, variances and higher-risk transactions
- Managing payroll watchlists and targeted assurance reviews
- Validating payroll banking files, reconciliations, GL interfaces and journals




- Identifying root causes of payroll errors and recommending preventative controls
- Supporting internal and external audits, control testing and remediation activity
- Producing reporting across payroll accuracy, risk and control effectiveness
- Strengthening payroll governance, procedures and control frameworks

About you

You will bring strong experience across payroll operations, assurance, compliance, audit or controls within a large and complex payroll environment. You will understand end to end payroll, reconciliations and exception management, with the analytical capability to identify risk and interrogate payroll data. Experience with Dayforce or another integrated HRIS/payroll platform will be highly regarded, alongside advanced Excel and strong stakeholder engagement skills.

Exposure to payroll remediation, transformation or highly regulated environments would be advantageous.

What’s on offer

This newly created permanent chance offers $115K + super, an attractive not-for-profit salary packaging benefit and three days per week working from home. It is an excellent opportunity for an experienced payroll professional to broaden their career beyond pure processing into controls, assurance, governance and risk in a payroll environment of scale and opportunity.

📌 Payroll Compliance Specialist (Sydney)
🏢 Tom
📍 Sydney