The payroll portion of the budget model can be an excessively long one because every person in the organization is listed on it. As a result, this portion of the budget becomes an unwieldy cluster of information requiring a long time to read as well as a considerable amount of updating work to keep track of everyone’s pay levels.
A simple improvement is to summarize these positions by title, ensuring that there are far fewer line items, so the budget becomes much easier to update and review. To do so, summarize the pay levels of everyone with the same job title and post their average pay rate in the model. If pay levels are on an hourly basis, then summarize annualized pay levels, excluding any overtime, and then list the average percentage of overtime hours worked per period in a separate cell within the budget (thereby clarifying the extent to which overtime is used).For those people who object that they can no longer determine who is summarized into which category, either issue a separate list that identified the title of each person in the organization or else insert the initials of all the people with each job title next to the summary-level descriptions in the budget (a difficult proposition when there are many people with the same title!).
The only real problem is in those organizations where there is no record of the job titles of the employees. In this case, it may be sufficient to summarize all payroll for each department into a single line item in the budget, with an average pay rate for the entire group; this approach completely avoids the problem of determining pay by title. Any of these variations will result in a simplified payroll section of the budget, while still retaining a high degree of accuracy.