Payroll week
Every pay period, someone collects timesheets. Some come from an app, some are a spreadsheet emailed by a site manager, some are paper sheets photographed on a phone. They add up the hours, work out which are overtime, check who was on holiday, apply the right rate for each site or role, and type the totals into the payroll software.
Then the queries start. Someone's overtime is missing. Someone was paid for a day they were off sick. A new starter's rate was wrong. Each query means going back through the original timesheet, the calculation and the payroll entry to find where it went wrong.
Why the retyping survives
It is not that there is no software. Most businesses have a payroll package and often a time-tracking app too. The problem is the space between them. Timesheets do not arrive in one clean format, and turning hours worked into pay items needs rules: time and a half after a certain number of hours, a different rate at weekends, a site allowance, holiday pay calculated a particular way.
Those rules are usually applied by one person in a spreadsheet they built themselves. It works, but it only works for them, and it is invisible to everyone else.
What goes wrong and what it costs
- Pay errors, which damage trust quickly even when they are small.
- A dependency on one person, which becomes a real problem during holidays or if they leave.
- Hours of checking every pay period to catch mistakes that should not have been made.
- Late timesheets holding up the whole payroll.
- No easy way to answer 'why was I paid this?' because the calculation is buried in a spreadsheet.
Pay queries matter more than most admin errors. People notice their own pay immediately, and a business that gets it wrong a few times starts to lose goodwill it needs elsewhere.
How we connect timesheets to payroll
- Collect timesheets from wherever they are: the time-tracking app's API, emailed spreadsheets read into a standard structure, and photographed paper sheets read with a document model and confirmed by the manager who sent them.
- Check completeness: every employee expected, every day accounted for, holidays and absence matched against your leave records.
- Apply your pay rules in code that you can read and review: overtime thresholds, weekend and night rates, site allowances, role-based rates, holiday pay method.
- Flag anything unusual for the relevant manager before payroll: hours well above normal, missing days, a rate that has changed, someone clocked in on a site they are not assigned to.
- Produce the payroll input: either a file in the exact import format your payroll software accepts, or a direct push through its API where one is available.
- Keep a record per employee per period showing hours, rules applied and resulting pay items, so any query can be answered by looking it up.
| Stage | Who is involved |
|---|---|
| Timesheet submission | Staff or site managers, as now |
| Rule application | Automatic |
| Unusual items | Relevant manager approves or corrects |
| Final payroll run | Your payroll person or bureau, as now |
We do not run payroll or calculate tax. That stays in your payroll software or with your bureau. We make sure what goes into it is right.
After it is in place
Payroll week becomes checking rather than calculating. Managers see and approve the odd cases before payroll rather than after pay day. Pay queries can be answered by showing the breakdown, not by recalculating. And the knowledge of how pay works is written down in rules that anyone can read, not in one spreadsheet.
Late timesheets stop being everyone's problem. The system knows who has not submitted and reminds them, and their manager, before the cut-off rather than on the morning payroll is due. If someone is still missing at the deadline, the payroll person can see exactly who and decide whether to pay on estimated hours or wait, instead of discovering the gap halfway through data entry.
When your pay rules change, for example a new overtime arrangement or a new site allowance, the change is made once in the rules and tested against a past period, rather than patched into a spreadsheet formula and hoped for.
Signs this applies to you
- Timesheets arrive in more than one format.
- Overtime and rates are worked out in a spreadsheet only one person understands.
- Pay queries after pay day are routine.
- Payroll is delayed while someone chases missing timesheets.