Owen is a Pre-Sales Engagement Manager and the second-ever employee to be hired at Sprout Solutions. Even before Sprout, he always had a keen interest in payroll and on this month’s Sprout Rockstar of the Month, he shares with us his story on how it came to be.
Payroll Prelude
“I definitely didn’t like payroll from the get-go— I actually wanted to be a doctor but my parents couldn’t afford to put me through medical school. So I ended up taking BS Accountancy for college. To be honest, it wasn’t easy since it wasn’t my first choice. Imagine: accountancy itself is difficult enough, it was even more challenging for me because I wasn’t interested in it!
Nevertheless, I graduated and got my first job in the accounting department of an HMO— I stayed there for almost a decade. During that time, I oversaw almost all sectors: payable, accounts receivable, bank recon, operating expenses, payroll, and even accounting supervisor. Of all those, I was the most interested in payroll— it was then when I realized that it was what I wanted to do in my life. It was my specialty.
After the HMO company, I moved to KMC, Sprout’s sister company, where I worked specifically in payroll. I was a payroll assistant, then payroll officer.”
Appreciating HR
“When I worked in the HMO company, payroll was under the accounting department, but I had 15 people working under me. They had different cultures, personalities, and backgrounds so it was challenging for me to adjust and coordinate everyone. Sometimes personal lives would leak into work lives and some of them couldn’t focus. I’d even had people ask me for marriage advice— I’m not even married! So I researched how to be sensitive to them and make them feel consoled but at the same time remind them that they should keep work and personal lives separate.
Then in KMC, unlike in my old company, payroll was under the HR department. It was there I got to see firsthand all the different tasks HR had to juggle: on top of recruitment, employee engagement, and conflict resolution, they needed to process 201 files, reports, and official certificates manually, which was more time consuming than it needed to be.
After being a manager, I understood the effort and trouble it took to do purely HR tasks… coupled with manual processing of files… I saw the burning need for a system— HR shouldn’t be manual.”
Helping Companies with Sprout
“That’s why I’m still at Sprout, still doing what I love which is payroll. But this time, I get to talk about a new kind of payroll to other companies. The sales department needed someone with an extensive background in payroll, so I was put in presales.
What I love about this position is that I don’t believe I’m trying to sell a product, but rather I’m helping companies with a solution. I’m not trying to be a part of their expenses, I am telling them how they could lessen their workload so they can focus on what their real job is, as opposed to the manual processes they do instead. As someone who already knows how demanding payroll and HR are, I know that Sprout has the solution to their problem.”
Why Payroll?
“I do get asked this a lot, because like I said, I wasn’t even interested in accounting when I started learning about it.
Among the branches that go under accounting, my favorite one was taxation. And part of payroll is in taxation— I just really enjoy it. In my old company, the alphalist was manual and I would process it myself, which means I would have to work overtime until the early mornings. I wasn’t mad about it or I didn’t feel burnt out. When you really love doing something, you won’t complain, you just do it.
That’s when I realized my love for payroll. I also worked at all types of departments when Sprout was starting out: marketing, professional services, support, sales, HR… The only department I didn’t go into was software development, since that required technical skills…
And with all of that, payroll is still what I enjoyed the most.”
Plans for the Future
“Actually, one of my childhood dreams was to become a teacher, and I do want to pursue it eventually. It may take a lot of work and determination before I get there, especially since I’ve really established myself in my career in payroll. But I still do think that I can pursue this other passion of mine, not necessarily as a full-time job, but still fulfilling my goal of being able to help people learn and share my knowledge with others.”
—————————————————————————————————————————————–
Sprout Rockstar of the Month is an initiative to highlight and celebrate the awesome people behind the company. Every month, we feature their stories and share how they used their experiences to become the rockstars that they are. Stay tuned next month for the next Sprout story!
The post Owen — Finding a Passion for Payroll (Sprout Rockstar of the Month) appeared first on Sprout.
source https://sprout.ph/blog/owen-sprout-rockstar/
