Payday, and the phone starts
Payday morning. A guard rings: he covered two nights at the hospital car park that are not on his payslip. Another says she was paid the standard rate for a bank holiday. A third says he was docked an hour because the rota shows 7pm but the client asked him to start at 6pm. The payroll administrator apologises, checks the rota, checks texts, and adds corrections to next month.
The root of it was earlier in the month. The payroll administrator took the rota spreadsheet at the cut-off date, adjusted it for the changes she knew about, and keyed hours and rates into the payroll software. Cover shifts arranged by phone at night were not on the rota. Early starts at a client's request were not recorded anywhere except the occurrence book on site.
Why guard hours are hard to pay correctly
Guarding pay combines a rota that changes daily with pay rules that vary by time, day and sometimes by site. The rota shows what was planned, not what was worked, and changes after it is published are made by phone and text. Payroll is only as accurate as the list of hours it is given.
| Source of error | Example |
|---|---|
| Cover shifts not on the rota | Night cover arranged by text |
| Early starts or late finishes | Client asked the guard to stay on |
| Rate rules applied by hand | Bank holiday or night rate missed |
| Site-specific rates | A contract that pays more per hour |
| Keying errors | Hours typed into payroll wrongly |
What your pay rules and employment terms are is for your company and its advisers. We apply the rules you give us.
What pay errors cost
Guards who are paid wrongly lose trust, and in a sector with high turnover that pushes good people to competitors. Payday becomes a stream of queries for the office. Corrections are costly and fiddly. Over time, patterns of under or overpayment can cause larger problems your advisers would want to know about. And the same hours are usually billed to clients, so an error in pay often means an error in the client invoice too.
A timesheet flow from booking on to payroll
- Guards book on and off through an app, a call to the control room or a site device, which records actual start and finish times against the shift.
- Actual times are compared with the rota. Differences, such as an early start or a late finish, need a reason and are sent to a supervisor to approve.
- Cover shifts arranged at short notice are created in the rota when accepted, so they are never missing from pay.
- Your pay rules are applied automatically: base rate, night and weekend rates, bank holiday rates, site-specific rates and overtime thresholds.
- Before payroll cut-off, the payroll administrator reviews a list of exceptions: unapproved differences, missing booking-off times and shifts with no booking on.
- Approved hours and rates are exported in the format your payroll software takes, or sent through its interface where it has one.
- Each guard can see their hours on their phone before payday, and query anything before it becomes a payslip problem.
- The same approved hours feed client billing, so pay and invoices match.
- Pay queries can be answered from the booking records.
The next payday
Before cut-off, the administrator works through a short exceptions list: one guard forgot to book off, two early starts to approve. The export goes to payroll. Guards have checked their hours in the app during the month, so the hospital car park cover and the bank holiday rate are already right. The few queries that come in are answered with the booking record.
When the client asks why their invoice includes an extra hour, it is the same approved hour the guard was paid for, with the supervisor's approval and reason.
Do your paydays look like this?
- Hours are keyed into payroll from the rota.
- Cover shifts arranged by phone go unpaid until someone complains.
- Night, weekend and bank holiday rates are applied by hand.
- Guards cannot see their hours before payday.
- Pay and client invoices do not always match.