Photocopy of a draft job specification for the L1 Payroll job. The file is divided into the following sections:
- Introduction
- Tasks
- Data
- Results
- Note 1: The identification of employees
- Note 2: Authorisation of wages
- Note 3: Calculation of pay
- Note 4: Calculation of time wages
- Note 5: Holiday pay
- Note 6: Income tax
- Note 7: Sickness & accident
- Note 8: Loans
- Note 9: National savings deductions
- Note 10: Methods of payment
- Note 11: Pay calculations outside LEO
- Note 12: Pension fund
- Note 13: National insurance
- Note 14: Other deductions
- Note 15: Payslips and payroll
- Note 16: New staff transfers in and joiners' and leavers' schedule
- Note 17: Amendments
- Note 18: Abnormalities: wages entries and reports

Also includes handwritten notes and a flowchart (A3) for Renold Chains Ltd. covering procedures for product data changes.

[Only the first few pages of this document has been scanned and uploaded to save time for cataloguing. A digital copy of the whole document can be made available upon request.]

Research comments: The program known within Lyons as L1 relates to payroll for Lyons bakeries employees. As the core LEO I development team was getting LEO up and running, this job was intended to be the first one run on the new computer. However the team soon realised that the job was just too complex to work as a trial, so they switched instead to focus on what was known as L3 (Bakery Valuations) and that became the first commercial computer program ever run.

For the L1 payroll program LEO calculated employees' pay including overtime, holiday and sick pay, tax and National Insurance deductions, pension contributions etc. At this point in time Lyons employees were paid weekly in cash, as was the case for most people in the country, and Lyons had thousands of employees - so the payroll job was an enormous undertaking and the new computer had to be reliable to ensure that staff were paid correctly and on time. The program also calculated contributions to the National Savings scheme, loan repayments, first and final wages for new starters and leavers, and it printed the payslip that was put into the envelope with the cash for every employee.

LEO began regular runs of the Lyons bakeries payroll in 1954 which was a world first for a computer. On 27th May 1954 Lyons celebrated the successful execution of the regular payroll job with a dinner held at the Cumberland Hotel in London. A menu for the occasion is also in the collection. The BBC covered the computerised payroll in February 1954; some of this video footage is also in the collection.

The Renold Chains handwritten notes in this file may have been added later; Renold Chains didn't buy a LEO until 1965 (LEO III/42), although they made use of LEO's bureau service earlier than that, whereby companies outside of the Lyons group could have programs run regularly by LEO staff.

Provenance :
From David Caminer's papers