What the job costs #
Salary is the part everyone quotes and the smallest part of the decision. Here is the employment cost at the national median, using the rates in force for the 2026 to 2027 tax year.
£28,996
Median salary
ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4129
£33,278
Employment cost a year
Salary, employer NI and minimum pension
£19
Per hour worked
37.5 hour week, 46.4 working weeks
| Item | A year | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Median salary | £28,996 | ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4129 |
| Employer National Insurance | £3,599 | 15 per cent above £5,000 |
| Minimum workplace pension | £683 | 3 per cent of qualifying earnings |
| Employment cost | £33,278 | About £19 an hour on a 37.5 hour week |
Recruitment, equipment, software seats, training and cover for holiday and sickness all sit on top, and they vary too much between businesses to put a number on here.
If you want to run your own figures, the true cost of an employee tool does this with your salary, hours and on costs.
What the week is actually made of #
Here is the job as it usually runs in a business, split by whether the work follows a fixed pattern or needs a person to decide something. This split is our analysis, not a survey, and your version of the role will differ.
Runs to a pattern (9 of 12)
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Enter purchase invoices into the accounting system daily
Read a document, put the values in fixed fields.
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Match invoices to purchase orders and delivery notes daily
A comparison against two reference documents.
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Reconcile the bank feed and clear unmatched items daily
Most lines match on amount, date and reference.
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Raise sales invoices from timesheets or job sheets weekly
Same calculation and template every time.
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Chase overdue customer payments by email weekly
A sequence triggered by an age bucket.
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Check staff expense claims against policy weekly
Policy limits and receipt rules are explicit.
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Prepare the supplier payment run for approval weekly
Due dates and terms decide what goes in.
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Prepare the VAT return workings monthly
Extract and total by code, on a fixed quarterly cycle.
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File invoices so they can be found again at audit daily
Naming and storage rules, applied consistently.
Needs a person (3 of 12)
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Reconcile supplier statements and query the differences monthly
Working out why two ledgers disagree takes a person.
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Post journals, accruals and prepayments at month end monthly
Knowing what to accrue is accounting judgement.
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Answer supplier and customer queries about invoices daily
Every query is slightly different and often political.
What to do before you advertise #
The question is not whether to hire. It is what the person will be doing on a Tuesday afternoon in March. Two things are worth doing first, and both take less effort than writing the advert:
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Count the week you are about to buy
Write down the jobs this role would pick up, how long each takes and how often it happens. The cost of admin time calculator adds it up and puts a cost on it.
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Separate the pattern from the judgement
If most of the hours sit in the first list above, a hire will absorb the pressure rather than remove it, and the same pressure returns when the business grows again.
Plenty of businesses do both: automate the repeated half, then hire someone to do the half that needs a person, often part time or at a level that keeps them interested. That is a better job than the one the advert usually describes.
Where this role usually sits #
This job turns up most often in accountancy , wholesale , trades and installers , logistics and haulage , recruitment and care , and the admin around it looks different in each.
A note on the pay figure #
£28,996 is the median for full time employees in SOC 4129, Financial administrative occupations n.e.c., from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional). ONS publishes a coefficient of variation with every figure, and this one is 2.5 per cent, which ONS treats as reliable.
It is a national figure covering every employer size and region. What a specific business pays depends on where it is, how specialised the job is, and what else is on offer nearby.