Lead Payroll Specialist, Payroll Bureau

Job Description

Job Description

Restaurant365 is transforming how restaurants run their businesses. Today, we help more than 50,000 restaurant locations manage their finances, operations, and people. As AI changes what's possible, we're reimagining how restaurant back offices operate—automating routine work, helping teams make better decisions, and giving restaurant leaders more time to focus on growing their businesses. 

We're transforming how we work, too. AI is changing how we build products, solve problems, and deliver results for our customers. We're embracing new ways of working, moving faster, and creating opportunities for our people to make a greater impact. 

At Restaurant365, our culture is built on ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement. We believe in challenging ourselves, learning every day, and working together to achieve great results. We're looking for people who are curious, take initiative, and want to grow while helping shape the future of an industry.

The Lead Payroll Specialist, Payroll Bureau manages the ongoing payroll experience for an assigned book of customers using native R365 Payroll. This role serves as the primary operational customer contact, preparing and reviewing payroll, resolving issues, communicating action items, and ensuring payroll is ready for customer approval. The specialist is accountable for accurate, timely, and well-documented payroll activities within the approved service scope. 

As the initial managed-service team member, the specialist partners with Payroll Operations leadership to help build and refine the service, establish scalable practices, and identify opportunities to improve customer outcomes. This includes developing repeatable workflows, strengthening controls, and contributing practical expertise as the Payroll Bureau grows. 

This is a hands-on, lead individual-contributor role requiring strong payroll expertise, customer relationship skills, sound judgment, and comfort working within an evolving offering. The role combines independent customer portfolio ownership with subject-matter expertise and cross-functional collaboration. Responsibilities may expand as the service and team grow. 

• Payroll Operations & Customer Ownership 

• Independently manage recurring payroll activities for assigned customers, coordinating inputs, deadlines, approvals, and follow-up to support accurate, timely payroll. 

• Maintain an understanding of customer payroll calendars, business practices, entities, locations, and approval requirements; translate those needs into consistent service delivery. 

• Review payroll readiness and required inputs, identify missing or inconsistent information, and coordinate customer decisions or corrections before processing deadlines. 

• Prepare or import approved payroll transactions, review calculations and variances, reconcile results, and investigate discrepancies within the approved service scope. 

• Perform payroll audits and reasonableness checks to identify unusual payments, material changes, calculation concerns, or other exceptions that require review or escalation. 

• Serve as the primary operational customer contact, explaining payroll results, presenting action items, setting expectations, and advising customers when payroll is ready for final approval and submission. 

• Support payroll corrections and off-cycle requests, coordinating customer instructions, internal dependencies, and appropriate approvals while considering downstream reporting and payment impacts. 

• Coordinate post-payroll reporting, reconciliation, issue resolution, and follow-up with customers and internal teams as appropriate. 

• Support customer onboarding, transition, and stabilization in partnership with Implementation and other service owners. 

• Coordinate additional customer services as the offering develops, which may include ACA, workers’ compensation, or 401(k) reporting, based on approved scope, training, and ownership. 

• Service Development & Lead Expertise 

• Partner with Payroll Operations leadership to develop and refine workflows, customer playbooks, controls, service standards, and coverage practices for the new offering. 

• Contribute to clear handoffs, readiness expectations, approval boundaries, and escalation paths across the customer lifecycle. 

• Act as a subject-matter expert for complex payroll scenarios and customer escalations, coordinating with appropriate internal teams and leadership to resolve issues. 

• Identify recurring issues, customer needs, product gaps, and process improvements; recommend practical solutions that strengthen accuracy, consistency, and scalability. 

• Contribute to service reporting and operational measures, such as payroll timeliness, accuracy, correction trends, customer responsiveness, and processing effort; communicate risks and improvement opportunities to leadership. 

• Develop and maintain reusable documentation and knowledge resources, incorporating lessons learned from payroll issues, customer feedback, and service delivery. 

• Support knowledge sharing, cross-training, backup coverage, and onboarding of future team members as the managed-service function grows. 

• Collaboration, Controls & Continuous Improvement 

• Collaborate with Implementation, Tax/Compliance, Customer Success, Support, Payments, Finance, Product, and Engineering to clarify ownership, manage dependencies, and support customer outcomes. 

• Preserve customer final payroll approval and follow established authorization requirements for payroll changes, funding-related activities, and other sensitive transactions. 

• Distinguish payroll recalculation and reporting impacts from tax-filing execution; coordinate technical tax determinations, filings, amendments, and related matters with Tax/Compliance or the designated owner. 

• Maintain accurate records of customer instructions, material decisions, payroll reviews, corrections, approvals, and escalations in approved systems. 

• Protect sensitive customer and employee information in accordance with privacy, security, access, retention, and internal control requirements; promptly escalate suspected security or payroll-integrity concerns. 

• Support quality reviews, audits, and root-cause analysis, helping translate findings into improved processes, documentation, training, or product feedback. 

• Use approved tools and appropriate automation to improve quality, reduce manual effort, and support consistent service delivery while maintaining human review and control discipline. 

• Participate in special projects and additional responsibilities aligned with the evolving managed-service offering and Payroll Operations priorities. 

• AI Fluency

• Find opportunities to automate and improve how work gets done across your role with approved AI and other tools, choosing the right tool for each task, refining your prompts, and reviewing outputs for quality and time saved. 

• 5+ years of hands-on payroll processing or payroll operations experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex payroll activities and customer outcomes. 

• Experience independently managing payroll across multiple customers, entities, locations, pay groups, or states, including competing payroll calendars and deadlines. 

• Strong knowledge of the end-to-end payroll cycle, including earnings, deductions, taxes, direct deposit, payroll reporting, reconciliation, corrections, and off-cycle processing. 

• Working knowledge of multi-state payroll tax and wage-and-hour concepts, with the ability to recognize payroll impacts and determine when specialist interpretation or escalation is needed. 

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to investigate variances, identify root causes, exercise sound judgment, and escalate risks appropriately. 

• Excellent customer communication and relationship-management skills, with the ability to explain payroll concepts, communicate required actions, manage expectations, and maintain confidence during difficult situations.