Payroll Team Leader

LIC is a farmer-owned co-operative that's been supporting herd improvement in New Zealand's dairy sector for more than 115 years. We're focused on providing superior genetics, reliable testing and diagnostics, integrated on-farm software, and great customer service, all designed to help farmers make smarter decisions every day.

As a proud generational co-operative, we're here for farmers, their families, and rural communities, not just for today, but for the future. And none of it happens without our people. Whether on farm, in the lab, or behind the scenes, every one of us plays a part in helping New Zealand farmers succeed.

Are you ready to take the lead in delivering accurate and timely payroll services? We're looking for an experienced Payroll professional to manage our payroll team, ensuring compliance and excellence in every pay cycle. This is an exciting opportunity to not only lead the payroll team but to play a key role in upcoming project work.

This is a hands-on leadership role where your expertise will help to shape the future of payroll within our organisation.

Leadership & Team Management:  

• Lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing payroll team.  
• Allocate and coordinate team workload to meet service delivery targets.  
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, collaboration, and accountability. 

Payroll Operations: 

• Oversee and assist with end-to-end payroll processing for NZ-based employees, ensuring accuracy and timeliness, including reconciliation of balance sheet accounts, payments and reporting to IRD.  
• Act as the escalation point for complex payroll queries and discrepancies.  
• Ensure payroll data integrity, confidentiality, and compliance with internal policies.  

Compliance & Legislation:  

• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of NZ employment legislation including the Holidays Act, PAYE, KiwiSaver and other statutory requirements.  
• Ensure payroll practices are compliant with current laws, individual and collective agreements, and audit standards.  
• Support internal and external audits, ensuring documentation and processes meet regulatory requirements.  
• Conduct risk analysis and develop mitigation strategies relating to fraud, misappropriation or misuse of information, and ensure all controls and compliance requirements are operating effectively and data integrity is maintained.  

Project Management:

• Lead and contribute to payroll-related projects, including system upgrades and configuration, process improvements and legislative change implementations. 
• Collaborate with People & Performance (P&P), Finance and IT teams to deliver integrated solutions.  
• Develop and maintain project documentation, timelines, and stakeholder communications. 

• Minimum of 5 years' experience in NZ payroll, with at least 2 years in a leadership role.  
• Relevant tertiary qualification, or equivalent previous experience.  
• Strong understanding of NZ payroll and employment legislation and compliance requirements.  
• Proven experience managing payroll system changes/projects.  
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills.  
• Experience with payroll/HRIS systems.  SAP preferred, but not essential.  

In addition to a competitive salary, you'll receive extra leave days, flexible working options, discounted health, life, income and disability insurances, access to our employee shares scheme, wellbeing discounts, free onsite parking, an employee assistance programme, plus more

If you're after a rewarding career that offers development, learning and loads of exceptional experiences then look no further, you've found it. At LIC we are leading the way and we would love to welcome you to the team.