Last year I went to the Secrets of Stonehenge Revealed exhibition and it has inspired this title – Mysteries of Payroll Revealed, because for many people payroll is as much of a mystery as Stonehenge.
Every week/fortnight/month money appears in personal bank accounts and everyone breathes a sigh of relief – bills can be paid, that new outfit can be bought, that dinner date can go ahead.
The biggest sigh of relief comes from the one who have processed that payroll – the payroll administrator/officer/specialist/manager: Another pay run over, xxx number of employees paid, …until the next pay run when it starts all over again.
Let’s explore the day in the life of a payroll administrator. For the purposes of this exercise I have condensed the process into an 8-hour day. While payroll can take more time than this, the steps are often the same.
Minus 8 hours to payroll commit
Check that timesheets are approved. Out of 10 timesheets, 1 is not approved. Send email to manager. Get an out of office: “I’m currently walking Milford Track and have limited access to emails. If your request is urgent, please email…” Try to track down an alternative approver because the suggested email belongs to someone who does not the authority or access to approve the timesheet.
Dayforce Solution: Managers can delegate authority to another person in their team who can approve timesheet while they are away. They can also approve leave requests so that these can be included in the pay run.
Minus 7 hours to payroll commit
All timesheets now approved. Download timesheets/leave approvals for upload to payroll software. Upload fails. Refer to IT Support to assistance. It may surprise most people to know that often the schedules/timesheets are held in one application and payroll in another so there is a download/upload required to process payroll.
Dayforce Solution: Dayforce is an integrated system meaning both time and attendance and payroll processing are held in the same system so therefore file downloads/uploads of timesheet and/or leave data is not required.
Minus 6.5 hours to payroll commit
Issue with upload resolved and timesheet/leave approvals uploaded to payroll software.
Minus 6 hours to payroll commit
Manager now remembers that an adjustment needed to be made to someone’s pay/hours/overtime and meant to tell you last week but has just remembered. Could this be done this pay? Unlock timesheets so that manager can add hours/overtime, wait for approval, lock timesheet again. As upload has already been done and can’t be uploaded again, add the adjustment manually to correspond to the timesheet entry.
Dayforce Solution: If a last-minute adjustment to a timesheet needs to be done, the payroll admin can unlock the timesheet, the manager makes and approves the adjustment and the timesheet can be locked again. The payroll admin then needs to do is recalculate the pay run for the adjustment to be included in payroll.
Minus 5.5 hours to payroll commit
Run payroll in the system. Very often this is not just a matter of pressing a button, but having to go through a series of steps as the payroll system takes the payroll data such as rate of pay, hours worked, overtime, leave etc, draws that into the payroll system, matches up the days/hours worked then works out tax rate and superannuation etc according to the settings in payroll.
Dayforce Solution: What makes Dayforce payroll unique in the payroll workspace is that a pay run can be opened and calculated at any time in the pay period and can be checked for anomalies continuously throughout this period. This means that errors can be fixed ahead of time which allows in-depth analysing, reviewing and correcting pay data prior to pay period end.
Minus 5 hours to payroll commit
Software system throws up a calculation error – something is not matching up in the system. Investigate and attempt to discover what this is and fix the system. Log a ticket with Support.
Dayforce Solution: Dayforce has dedicated payroll support 24/7 that allows system errors to be logged as a Severity 1 Case. This is reserved for genuine emergencies where an issue is impacting payroll commit. This service “follows the sun”, that is, the support team is world-wide so the ticket will be attended to in real time, without waiting for a support team in another region to arrive at work. So applicable to New Zealand which can be as much as a day ahead of other regions.
Minus 4.5 hours to payroll commit
Run payroll reports. In most systems this also includes a report to compare the last pay run to current pay to identify where a particular pay may be over/under. This works well for normal Monday to Friday 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week staff but a little trickier for those with variable hours. Unpaid leave can also skew a regular pay as well as extra hours worked. Find and correct any discrepancies. This can be the most labour-intensive part of payroll.
Dayforce Solution: Dayforce has several audit tools within the payroll module which allows checking according to several parameters, such as gross pay comparison to last gross pay, audit summary whereby individual earnings, deductions, tax etc can be reviewed, as well as summary audits. And, as per the point above, this can be done at any time ahead of the pay period end date to identify discrepancies and errors well ahead of pay date.
Minus 3 hours to payroll commit
Send payroll reports to payroll authoriser to be checked and approved.
Minus 2.5 hours to payroll commit
Approver has query on some employees’ earnings and/or deductions of the payroll report. Investigate and report back.
Dayforce Solution: Within the payroll module, payroll admins can filter on an individual employee and view their actual payslip in a fly-out screen. This fly-out also has additional tabs such as timesheet, time data and GL preview (if configured). This makes investigating and reporting on elements of an employee’s pay fast and an explanation provided timeously so that the authoriser can proceed.
Minus 2 hours to payroll commit
Payroll approved. Next step is to create the bank file to upload to the bank so that staff can be paid. File downloaded and uploaded to the bank. Bank returns an error message – a bank account number is incorrect. Delete upload and track down the bank account causing the issue, go through employee records, find the bank account on file and compare. Amend bank account and attempt to upload file again. Note that in some software programs, you must reprocess the pay run again for the bank file to download with the new bank account. This is a security feature but takes up time.
Dayforce Solution: The bank file is created as soon as the pay run is committed. If a bank number is incorrect, this can be corrected in employee’s records and the bank file generated again without having to reprocess the pay run.
Minus 1 hour to payroll commit
Send message to bank file approvers to authorise the payment files in the bank. Follow up with approvers. Breathe sign of relief when this is done.
Zero hour – payroll committed
Post Payroll
Send out payslips and print/download payroll reports. Upload payroll journals to accounting system.
Dayforce Solution: While providing a payslip is not a legal requirement in New Zealand, it is best practice to do so. Dayforce produces payslips as an Earnings Statement which are added to an employee’s record and are available within Dayforce for the employee to log in and view.
Furthermore, these earning statements are stored in one area of the employee’s record so that they access not just the current payslip but also previous payslips. Payroll reports run automatically on payroll commit so are available to download from Archived Reports within the pay run. And if the GL export has been enabled, this is also available either as an archived report or as a file transfer to a SFTP system such as Filezilla.
Plus 1 hour after payroll commit
Employee sends email; “My pay is wrong, you didn’t pay me for…”
Dayforce Solution: While errors in payroll can always occur, especially as payroll personnel tends to be the last to know, as Dayforce is an integrated system the possibility of persistent errors is reduced. The HR record within Dayforce holds all compensation data such as employee’s salary, days and hours worked, entitlement policy, pay policy and payroll policy.
The payroll elections feature holds regular earnings such as allowances, as well as regular deductions. The Time Away From Work module holds leave information and feeds approved leave directly into the employee timesheet.
All these elements are loaded into the pay run once it is opened and calculated. An amendment made to any of these elements can be calculated and viewed at any time in the pay period to ensure that the pay is correct. Mistakes happen but with all these elements embedded in the one system, there is less chance of a mistake occurring.
And a mistake-free pay run makes for happy employees 😊
