Administrative Assistant vs. Accounting: Which career path is better?

I have a question, and please forgive me if this seems a bit trivial, but it concerns my professional duties...
Does a secretary typically handle payroll processing, or is that strictly an accounting function?
To provide some context, a colleague who has been away on extended medical and maternity leave wants to hand over these payroll responsibilities to me because she feels overwhelmed and lacks the necessary expertise. Up until now, we’ve used an outside contractor who handled everything perfectly. Now that she's returning, she's attempting to shift this entire burden onto my plate. It makes me wonder... if the company is already paying for professional services, why am I being asked to take this on?

Standard procedure dictates that accounting handles everything, though I suppose if there’s a specific arrangement in place, someone else could step in. That said, in my experience, I have never actually heard of an executive assistant being tasked with payroll. I can certainly empathize with how much things have shifted over the last couple of years—even for those of us who live and breathe this stuff every day, keeping up with the constant flux can feel like trying to hit a moving target. However, my take is that when an accountant returns to their role after an absence, they really ought to make a concerted effort to get back up to speed. They should be proactive, asking questions, seeking counsel, and simply stepping back into the responsibilities they held before. I mean, what's the logic there? If tax laws change or new IRS forms are introduced, are we honestly expected to say, "Oh, I'm intimidated by these updates, so let's just hand them off to the secretary"? It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed when you've been away for a while—it can feel like the ground is shifting under your feet—but if this was the job assigned to her from the start, she needs to accept that part of the gig is continuous learning. You have to adapt and put in the work to bridge those knowledge gaps. There are endless resources available—textbooks, professional forums, seminars, or even just reaching out to colleagues for a bit of guidance—but simply saying "I don't know how to do this" and immediately passing the buck to someone else without making a genuine effort to learn... I just can't get behind that.

I taught her absolutely everything she needed to know, with the exception of how to handle the payroll. Those first few days were a total nightmare because none of it had anything to do with being an executive assistant, but I gave it my all and managed to pull through. We’re a pretty niche firm—even our outside consultants have pointed that out.
But now, this lady wants to dump all her responsibilities onto someone else. Since I’ve already mastered the invoicing process
along with everything else she was supposed to grasp—online banking, chasing down dozens of vendors just to get them to actually do their jobs... even the consultant told her she needs to step up. Honestly, if that's the case, why is the company even paying her? She clearly doesn't realize that I have to file an R1 form for every single invoice. She thinks we have seven days to handle the pension filings, when in reality, the deadline is strictly set by the IRS...🤦

The lady maintains a rather casual attitude toward her responsibilities—one might even say indifferent. What exactly is the employer’s take on all this?

We actually have a pretty decent manager for once in this day and age... He was fully expecting her to take over those duties so we wouldn't have to keep paying an outside consultant. He didn't really give her a straight answer though, probably because she caught him right as he was posting about how she wouldn't be handling payroll. So now we're stuck in this weird spot where the contractor is still coming in to show her the ropes, just not the paychecks haha. If she ever actually starts doing them, who knows when we'll see our money... I think I'm going to tell the boss that I'm not interested in carrying someone else's workload anymore, especially since I'm only here until the permanent employee returns from maternity leave... and honestly, I'm just not in the mood to deal with the learning curve. Maybe it would be easier for her to just have another baby so she can be out of the picture for another couple of years...

It will likely end up this way—at least for the time being—with an outside contractor stepping in to handle those responsibilities. I suspect you ought to learn how to manage payroll from the ground up; if that transition actually occurs, you should certainly demand a raise. After all, isn't managing payroll significantly more complex than simply processing invoices, paying bills, or handling new hire paperwork?

That's true, we will definitely need to get organized...

How does one go about learning accounting?
Where should I even begin?

Should I focus on payroll processing and everything related to that?

Google is your best friend